6 ms·

> the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full huma

by d33 10y ago

> the entire source code for the human brain has to be strictly less than 700 MB, because the fully sequenced human genome which obviously encodes the full human mind is less than 700 MB uncompressed Actually those 700MB are compressed, in a way so sophisticated that we don't really know how to uncompress it yet - or whether it's even possible without the external resources our planet provides. And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture.

logicallee 10y ago
What I mean by uncompressed is that you're reading the cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T) as being two bits per base pair (1 of 4 possibilities). There are 3 billion base pairs, which is 6 billion bits, divided by 8 to get bytes you get 750 MB. The human genome is somewhat redundant and can be further compressed. That is just the string of "ones and zeros" (ACGT) could be run through whatever compression algorithm you wanted. But don't take my word for it: >"When the 4 bases are packed into one byte ( .2bit format) the size is 770M (hg18.2bit) , but you'll need an extra tool to decypher the data." [1] 2. You raise an important point: >And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture. Yes, absolutely. I simply called it an upper bound on how complex a brain's architecture could be. DNA obviously encodes the brain's architecture, since humans all have human brains. Beyond that, there is a very large variation in people's mental capabilities and brains, and the largest variation of all comes from culture. But culture could be given to a virtualized brain (called training). Bear in mind that when human brains receive culture, it takes them years of all-day training before they're even able to speak. So full 1x human brains take a long time to train. When you see results out of neural nets that are similar to what very young toddlers can do, you should be awed. We have the computational power in server farms to do what full brains do -- if not now, then soon. This isn't some sci-fi pipe dream. Go ahead and look at the facts. [1] https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/ https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/
- wvyar 10y ago
  I think that your "700MB uncompressed" fails to take into account that the construction, development, and maturation of the brain relies heavily on cellular and molecular mechanisms. I think it is a little disingenuous to hide the enormous wealth of information necessary to create a brain, much less understand and utilize one, inside of your compiler.
  - JonnieCache 10y ago
    >hide... inside of your compiler. Not to mention the rest of the ecosystem. Look what happens to humans when they grow up without being properly embedded in the family, with its hundreds of thousands of years of historical contingency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) We can't even begin to describe the amount of information encoded there.
    - logicallee 10y ago
      uh, you can begin to describe the amount of information. if someone grew up with sensory input limited to HD video meaning something like 6-10 GB/hour they would be handicapped versus other humans but not drastically so. In 6 years there are 52,560 hours. A large library, sure, but we already have all this digitized anyway. I'm cutting a lot of corners, and the human substrate in which our brains are embedded is finicky - you can't just leave a toddler in a roomful of DVD's with food and get a fully functioning adult after 48 months of unsupervised training. but it's not "can't even begin to describe the amount of information encoded there" either. 50,000 blue ray discs' worth oughta do it. I'm not saying we've figured out any of the other stuff - it's just that computationally (horsepower) we're there; the later training set for unsupervised learning is also there; etc. The missing parts might well seem insurmountable - but every result that shows AI performing at the level of a 2 or 3 year old is wonderful. This is it. This is beginning of the turning point. It can happen at any moment. Someone at this very moment could be setting up a neural net that after 48 months of training can deduce its own status in the world, make novel and correct sentences, maintain a coherent world-view, and be trained on the entirety of the Internet at 10x the speed of adult brains. (The limit is 1,000,000x speed of adult brains - because the silicon substrate we're using today propagates signals literally a million times faster - today.) We're there. It's all there. It's "just" 86,000,000,000 neurons (with 7k connections each) and 12 years of supervised training to get to the level of a 12-year-old. 3 pounds. 20 watts. This is happening. Amazon's and Google's server farms blow it out of the water computationally compared to a brain, today. we might not come up with the same architecture but what we are coming up with is making breathtaking progress. ------------ EDIT: I've been submitting too much, but I agree with JonnieCache's thoughts below. However, as a thought exercise there is no reason we couldn't train AI interactively, putting it in a VR room and literally talking to it and correcting it, etc, like a pet. Granted this is not a normal approach to take but since we're discussing the theoretical limitations you can certainly envision it. Obviously nobody is trying to do that - we're not trying to come up with sentience using an approach like this and have no idea what steps humans go through exactly to get there. But it's not computational power that keeps us from getting there - and we could be surprised at any time.
oh_sigh 10y ago
Imagine a very compact, compressed representation of the most complicated CPU on the planet. How many MB do you think that would be?

by d33 10y ago

logicallee 10y ago

What I mean by uncompressed is that you're reading the cytosine (C), guanine (G), adenine (A), or thymine (T) as being two bits per base pair (1 of 4 possibilities). There are 3 billion base pairs, which is 6 billion bits, divided by 8 to get bytes you get 750 MB. The human genome is somewhat redundant and can be further compressed. That is just the string of "ones and zeros" (ACGT) could be run through whatever compression algorithm you wanted. But don't take my word for it: >"When the 4 bases are packed into one byte ( .2bit format) the size is 770M (hg18.2bit) , but you'll need an extra tool to decypher the data." [1] 2. You raise an important point: >And keep in mind that those 700MB only describe how to prepare the basic concept of the brain, whose memory is then packed with information we get from the culture. Yes, absolutely. I simply called it an upper bound on how complex a brain's architecture could be. DNA obviously encodes the brain's architecture, since humans all have human brains. Beyond that, there is a very large variation in people's mental capabilities and brains, and the largest variation of all comes from culture. But culture could be given to a virtualized brain (called training). Bear in mind that when human brains receive culture, it takes them years of all-day training before they're even able to speak. So full 1x human brains take a long time to train. When you see results out of neural nets that are similar to what very young toddlers can do, you should be awed. We have the computational power in server farms to do what full brains do -- if not now, then soon. This isn't some sci-fi pipe dream. Go ahead and look at the facts. [1] https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/ https://www.biostars.org/p/5514/

wvyar 10y ago
I think that your "700MB uncompressed" fails to take into account that the construction, development, and maturation of the brain relies heavily on cellular and molecular mechanisms. I think it is a little disingenuous to hide the enormous wealth of information necessary to create a brain, much less understand and utilize one, inside of your compiler.
- JonnieCache 10y ago
  >hide... inside of your compiler. Not to mention the rest of the ecosystem. Look what happens to humans when they grow up without being properly embedded in the family, with its hundreds of thousands of years of historical contingency: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genie_(feral_child) We can't even begin to describe the amount of information encoded there.
  - logicallee 10y ago
    uh, you can begin to describe the amount of information. if someone grew up with sensory input limited to HD video meaning something like 6-10 GB/hour they would be handicapped versus other humans but not drastically so. In 6 years there are 52,560 hours. A large library, sure, but we already have all this digitized anyway. I'm cutting a lot of corners, and the human substrate in which our brains are embedded is finicky - you can't just leave a toddler in a roomful of DVD's with food and get a fully functioning adult after 48 months of unsupervised training. but it's not "can't even begin to describe the amount of information encoded there" either. 50,000 blue ray discs' worth oughta do it. I'm not saying we've figured out any of the other stuff - it's just that computationally (horsepower) we're there; the later training set for unsupervised learning is also there; etc. The missing parts might well seem insurmountable - but every result that shows AI performing at the level of a 2 or 3 year old is wonderful. This is it. This is beginning of the turning point. It can happen at any moment. Someone at this very moment could be setting up a neural net that after 48 months of training can deduce its own status in the world, make novel and correct sentences, maintain a coherent world-view, and be trained on the entirety of the Internet at 10x the speed of adult brains. (The limit is 1,000,000x speed of adult brains - because the silicon substrate we're using today propagates signals literally a million times faster - today.) We're there. It's all there. It's "just" 86,000,000,000 neurons (with 7k connections each) and 12 years of supervised training to get to the level of a 12-year-old. 3 pounds. 20 watts. This is happening. Amazon's and Google's server farms blow it out of the water computationally compared to a brain, today. we might not come up with the same architecture but what we are coming up with is making breathtaking progress. ------------ EDIT: I've been submitting too much, but I agree with JonnieCache's thoughts below. However, as a thought exercise there is no reason we couldn't train AI interactively, putting it in a VR room and literally talking to it and correcting it, etc, like a pet. Granted this is not a normal approach to take but since we're discussing the theoretical limitations you can certainly envision it. Obviously nobody is trying to do that - we're not trying to come up with sentience using an approach like this and have no idea what steps humans go through exactly to get there. But it's not computational power that keeps us from getting there - and we could be surprised at any time.

oh_sigh 10y ago

Imagine a very compact, compressed representation of the most complicated CPU on the planet. How many MB do you think that would be?