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According to [1, probably paywalled], it's present in both vertebrates and invertebrates, but not plants or fungi, indicating that it's animal specific, but sti

by rflrob 10y ago

According to [1, probably paywalled], it's present in both vertebrates and invertebrates, but not plants or fungi, indicating that it's animal specific, but still quite ancient. What the authors have found is not that cephalopods can edit their RNA, but that they do it a lot more than has previously been reported in other animals. I assiduously avoid studying the brain and behavioral complexity because that stuff is incredibly complicated, but I'm pretty skeptical about the authors' claims in the popular press that this is likely responsible for---or even particularly connected to---cephalopod intelligence or learning. My bet would be that in general, you get intelligence by complicated wiring, but that you don't necessarily need complicated neurons to do that wiring. By analogy, what makes the latest Intel processors so much better than an 8086 has a little bit to do with the 64-bit architecture, but a lot more to do with the radically smaller transistors. [1] http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-biochem-060208-105251 http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev-biochem...

AnimalMuppet 10y ago
> By analogy, what makes the latest Intel processors so much better than an 8086 has a little bit to do with the 64-bit architecture, but a lot more to do with the radically smaller transistors. I'm not sure you can draw that distinction. I don't program the transistors, I program the architecture, and the 64-bit architecture is massively better than the 8086 architecture. But the 64-bit architecture would not be possible without the radically smaller transistors, because it requires so many more of them, and that wouldn't be possible (on a realistic die size) without the smaller transistors.
- deleted 10y ago
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- Retric 10y ago
  Alternatively, on on 3,000 nm a scaled up 64 bit CPU would actually be slower due to latency issues for many workloads than the 8086. Further a scaled down 8086 would be slower on modern transistors than a 64bit CPU on most but not all workloads so transistors are the most important difference.
dluan 10y ago
That's a good guess, but I think what you're speculating about is the abstracted level on top of the gene design that creates the 'hardware'. Yeah, that'd be cool to figure out the actual blueprint you'd need for neural connections -> conscious, but knowing how that system was designed in the first place may reveal that you're just one on branch that is the tree for the 'architecture'.
jacquesm 10y ago
> By analogy, what makes the latest Intel processors so much better than an 8086 has a little bit to do with the 64-bit architecture, but a lot more to do with the radically smaller transistors. It has to do with the fact that there are more of them, and that in turn depends for power usage and speed on their size, but not in an absolute sense. So you could have built a 64 bit processor in the 80's, it's just that it would have been fairly large and a lot slower due to the signal set-up time, and it would use an enormous amount of power.

by rflrob 10y ago

AnimalMuppet 10y ago

> By analogy, what makes the latest Intel processors so much better than an 8086 has a little bit to do with the 64-bit architecture, but a lot more to do with the radically smaller transistors. I'm not sure you can draw that distinction. I don't program the transistors, I program the architecture, and the 64-bit architecture is massively better than the 8086 architecture. But the 64-bit architecture would not be possible without the radically smaller transistors, because it requires so many more of them, and that wouldn't be possible (on a realistic die size) without the smaller transistors.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Retric 10y ago
Alternatively, on on 3,000 nm a scaled up 64 bit CPU would actually be slower due to latency issues for many workloads than the 8086. Further a scaled down 8086 would be slower on modern transistors than a 64bit CPU on most but not all workloads so transistors are the most important difference.

dluan 10y ago

That's a good guess, but I think what you're speculating about is the abstracted level on top of the gene design that creates the 'hardware'. Yeah, that'd be cool to figure out the actual blueprint you'd need for neural connections -> conscious, but knowing how that system was designed in the first place may reveal that you're just one on branch that is the tree for the 'architecture'.

jacquesm 10y ago

> By analogy, what makes the latest Intel processors so much better than an 8086 has a little bit to do with the 64-bit architecture, but a lot more to do with the radically smaller transistors. It has to do with the fact that there are more of them, and that in turn depends for power usage and speed on their size, but not in an absolute sense. So you could have built a 64 bit processor in the 80's, it's just that it would have been fairly large and a lot slower due to the signal set-up time, and it would use an enormous amount of power.