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Comparing Human Brain with a CPU is misconception. no it is not. Yeah architecturally they are very different and CPU are arguably more programmable / general a
by The_rationalist 6y ago
Comparing Human Brain with a CPU is misconception. no it is not.
Yeah architecturally they are very different and CPU are arguably more programmable / general and less efficient.
What does matter is whether CPUs are theoretically able to achieve all the things that a brain can do (and even more)
And indeed CPUs as turing complete, programmable machine are a strict superset of what brains can do.
The gap between what task and at which accuracy a brain achieve vs a CPU is decreasing each year as you can contemplate on the paperswithcode.com leaderboards.
The difficulty is in software, hardware through clusterisation has arguably order of magnitude more compute than a brain has.
There are four big missing pieces to match human brain performance:
1) Matching its pattern recognition abilities
I believe that current statistical learning techniques of SOTA neural networks actually outperform humans on learning continuous data.
But humans outperforms by far current software at zero/few shot learning on sparse/discrete data (where gradient descent is not applicable)
I believe humans have this performance edge because of 2), 3) and 4):
2) humans can encode and decode meaning with great accuracy in a high level, descriptive complete declarative language called natural languages.
They are in many ways far superior to current GQL/datalog/SQL DB languages at encoding and retrieving meaning (that is an isomorphic description of a denoted thing).
The field of semantic parsing (+ question answering from the parsed knowledge) is the key to general language understanding and crucially lack funding.
Once machines will be able to understand language and retrieve all the knowledge of say Wikipedia, they will be able to transcend human performance on many intelligence/erudition tasks.
3) humans seems to be able to do meaningful runtime code generation.
That is you can develop on demand new solutions to new problems: such as https://www.kaggle.com/c/abstraction-and-reasoning-challenge https://www.kaggle.com/c/abstraction-and-reasoning-challenge
The field of specification and implementation generation is too underfunded.
4) is the observation that
3) is probably a necessary key for unlocking 2) and that both 2) and 3) are needed to achieve this communication/feedback loop between high level semantic reasoning and statistical operations.
As we can see, humanity overfocus funding on 1) despite being the most solved of all others necessary foundation's to achieve AGI and hence, as a side effect, empirically prove that CPUs superset brains
- JBiserkov 6y agoI agree. For some reason 2) and 3) reminded me of the book "The mating mind" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)#Books https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey_Miller_(psychologist)...
- otabdeveloper4 6y agoThe human brain isn't Turing-complete. Turing completeness implies infinite recursion, which the brain obviously can't do.
- rabryan 6y agoWhy is that obvious? My brain’s been infinitely recursing for years as far as I know
- lagadu 6y agoTechnically Turing completeness requires infinite memory for that (or an infinite tape if we're talking about the original turing machine concept), which no Turing-complete machine has. In other words, the brain is as Turing-complete as any machine that we also consider to be so. We'll always be bounded by limited memory and limited time.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y agoWe do not know if human brain is indeed Turing-complete, or even if it is a Turing machine at all. Human Mind certainly is, but if brain is or not we do not know.
- mannykannot 6y agoWhile I agree that comparing a human brain or mind to a Turing machine is not helpful, the objection you make here is less significant than it first appears. There is a subtle difference between unbounded recursion, which a Turing machine is taken to be capable of, and the actual ability to achieve infinite recursion. In no application of a Turing machine, either as an actual physical device or as a hypothetical one in a logical argument, is it ever required to perform infinite recursion, which would just be one way of not halting. For all practical and theoretical purposes, what matters is that the machine being considered does not exhaust its ability to recurse while performing the computations being considered. Consequently, the standard practice, of saying that computers and certain other devices are Turing-equivalent, with the usually-implicit caveat of being so up to the limit of their recursive ability, is both reasonable and useful.