5 ms·

The brain is massively parallel, your analysis seems to assume 0 parallelism.

pizza 10y ago
True; but one way I can get around this is that the strategies don't all require the same underlying brain architecture requirements. For instance number 1 doesn't even require a brain. Other than that, doesn't my analysis, concerning only the order of steps that must occur in aggregate per algorithm, sorta work out regardless of parallelism? Or do you mean that a multi-state computational brain could do a collection of moves simultaneously, say a vector of n linear actions as 1 brain vector-action?
- aidenn0 10y ago
  There are fairly simple physical processes that can solve assumed exponential time problems in constant time for low values of N (most famously probably soap bubbles and the spanning tree problem).
- andrepd 10y ago
  I think it's not even remotely productive to make these wild assumptions about how the brain works. We know very little about the workings of the brain. It's very probable that this sort of analysis has almost no correlation to what's actually happening in the brain.
  - pizza 10y ago
    I get where you're coming from, but you're demanding too much rigor prematurely for my nascent idea :P Which, come to think of it, probably is related to my having browsed half of some Scott Aaronson paper on the philosophy of computational complexity.. You know what they say - neurons that fire together, wire together! Just replace the "brains" in my post with "completely fictional abstract mechanistic brains whose behavior a human brain can emulate, hopefully not so far off from the qualia of The Real Thing." But I'm a big boy, and am all ears to PubMed-and-the-ilk articles that go into why I'm wrong! I guess the point is, if you can sort of recognize these patterns of information process at a Very High Level Internal Logic and Monologue (tm? lol) in your experiences with consciousness - i.e. how would you explain how you thought internally from a premise to an answer - would it look much differently than this? I doubt that the most pragmatic answer would include descriptions of the microsecond-level G-protein transactions, the millisecond tree diagram of where each synapse released how many vesicle molecules, how these were interpreted and then made sense of via an internal vocalization process, etc? At the end of the day, how evidence based or proof based does arm-chair navel-gazing really need to be? :P All tongue in cheek, of course. But maybe this discussion gives some people "intuition pumps" (ew, I just cited Dennett..) with which they'll make their own falsifiable claims that may even hopefully be worth sharing themselves.
Okkef 10y ago
Parallelism doesn't matter for big-O complexity
ncallaway 10y ago
Instead of time-analysis consider it to be space analysis and the analogy holds up pretty well.
m12k 10y ago
So it's an analysis of the cost of listening in attention/energy, not of time before the processing is done.
soberhoff 10y ago
You could also just point out that the brain is finite, if you were nitpicking.
pjc50 10y ago
Taking analogies literally deducts at least one point from your listening score.
sn9 10y ago
The brain may be parallel, but attention [0] isn't for all intents and purposes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention
Klockan 10y ago
The conversation will take O(n) time no matter what, so parallelism doesn't matter.

pizza 10y ago

True; but one way I can get around this is that the strategies don't all require the same underlying brain architecture requirements. For instance number 1 doesn't even require a brain. Other than that, doesn't my analysis, concerning only the order of steps that must occur in aggregate per algorithm, sorta work out regardless of parallelism? Or do you mean that a multi-state computational brain could do a collection of moves simultaneously, say a vector of n linear actions as 1 brain vector-action?

aidenn0 10y ago
There are fairly simple physical processes that can solve assumed exponential time problems in constant time for low values of N (most famously probably soap bubbles and the spanning tree problem).
andrepd 10y ago
I think it's not even remotely productive to make these wild assumptions about how the brain works. We know very little about the workings of the brain. It's very probable that this sort of analysis has almost no correlation to what's actually happening in the brain.
- pizza 10y ago
  I get where you're coming from, but you're demanding too much rigor prematurely for my nascent idea :P Which, come to think of it, probably is related to my having browsed half of some Scott Aaronson paper on the philosophy of computational complexity.. You know what they say - neurons that fire together, wire together! Just replace the "brains" in my post with "completely fictional abstract mechanistic brains whose behavior a human brain can emulate, hopefully not so far off from the qualia of The Real Thing." But I'm a big boy, and am all ears to PubMed-and-the-ilk articles that go into why I'm wrong! I guess the point is, if you can sort of recognize these patterns of information process at a Very High Level Internal Logic and Monologue (tm? lol) in your experiences with consciousness - i.e. how would you explain how you thought internally from a premise to an answer - would it look much differently than this? I doubt that the most pragmatic answer would include descriptions of the microsecond-level G-protein transactions, the millisecond tree diagram of where each synapse released how many vesicle molecules, how these were interpreted and then made sense of via an internal vocalization process, etc? At the end of the day, how evidence based or proof based does arm-chair navel-gazing really need to be? :P All tongue in cheek, of course. But maybe this discussion gives some people "intuition pumps" (ew, I just cited Dennett..) with which they'll make their own falsifiable claims that may even hopefully be worth sharing themselves.

Okkef 10y ago

Parallelism doesn't matter for big-O complexity

ncallaway 10y ago

Instead of time-analysis consider it to be space analysis and the analogy holds up pretty well.

m12k 10y ago

So it's an analysis of the cost of listening in attention/energy, not of time before the processing is done.

soberhoff 10y ago

You could also just point out that the brain is finite, if you were nitpicking.

pjc50 10y ago

Taking analogies literally deducts at least one point from your listening score.

sn9 10y ago

The brain may be parallel, but attention [0] isn't for all intents and purposes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention

Klockan 10y ago

The conversation will take O(n) time no matter what, so parallelism doesn't matter.