6 ms·
Transistor first reported as "little brain cell"
- medler 3y agoEnjoyed this post. It’s interesting to me that they actually refer to vacuum tubes as little brain cells as well. It’s not clear to me how far back the computer-as-brain analogy goes, but as far back as 1833 you have Babbage’s difference engine being described as a “thinking machine” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Difference_engine
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- detourdog 3y agoI have some Autonetics documentation for D17-B that disscusses running all the inputs and all the outputs to a single module called the central processing unit.
- anyfoo 3y agoIn old German movies and documentaries, “Elektronengehirn” (literally “electron brain”) is a term I’ve encountered a lot. It is unknown nowadays.
- glhaynes 3y agoI've seen quite a bit of USA stuff from ~the 1940s–1950s (maybe even some of the 1960s?) use the term "electronic brain" interchangeably with "computer".
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- readyplayernull 3y agoAlso the memristor was expected to be the component that in the future would work as an artificial neuron.
- rishav_sharan 3y agoWhat's up with memristors now? I remember there being so much hype around it some years ago. Are they coming to computers any time soon?
- rzzzt 3y agoHP partnered with SK hynix in 2010: https://news.skhynix.com/hynix-collaborates-with-hp-on-next-generation-memory-products-reram/ https://news.skhynix.com/hynix-collaborates-with-hp-on-next-... These ReRAM products did not seem to emerge however.
- actionfromafar 3y agoI wonder how much of the ideas for applications of memristors could be implemented in more normal hardware applied in non-traditional ways, such as matching slower (non-central!) processors with flash etc. Putting the compute nearer the storage, instead of putting the storage in the periphery.
- p1esk 3y agoArtificial synapse, not neuron.
- monitron 3y agoI love that. It’s funny, though – I know the transistor is “little” compared to the vacuum tube, but look at it next to an actual brain cell and it’s enormous!
- ravenstine 3y agoToday there are transistors on the nanometer scale, whereas brain cells are on the micrometer scale.
- connicpu 3y agoOf course a single brain cell performs a more complex operation than a single transistor
- bbor 3y agoThis is a funny offhand comment, but I think indicates a common mistake in this kind of computer-as-brain thinking that has lead to most modern thinkers (or at least most modern HNers) dismissing it: being lazy with the scales. Just because the brain is composed of connected cells doesn’t mean that those individual cells are the right place to start any analysis. Real neuroscience, AFAICT, has been pointing away from “each neuron is a step in a process” and pointing towards “each neuron is a small part of many different structures” for a while now
- ravenstine 3y agoYes, for instance, there's a lot more going on in the axons and dendrites than was even initially thought.
- jon_richards 3y agoMy favorite example was neurons in your eye that see something and send signals out laterally so when they (after a specific time-delay) meet another neuron that is currently seeing the thing, they combine to trigger a signal that can be directly interpreted as movement in a specific direction at a specific arc-speed. Just one of the ways visual information is heavily processed before traveling along your optic nerve.
- rzzzt 3y agoNo vacuum and glass envelope? I'll believe it when I see one.
- actionfromafar 3y agoLLM first reported as "intelligent".
- sandworm101 3y agoFirst LLM diagnosed as sociopathic. First identified as bigoted. First as just being a jerk. First to be denied a government permit. First refused entry at a national border. First not to be invited back to the Oscars. There are plenty of interesting hurdles yet to come
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- lukeschlather 3y agoI was expecting the article to mention a fact I just looked up: Nvidia's newest H100 GPU has roughly 80 billion transistors which is roughly equivalent to the number of neuron cells in the human brain. I would be surprised if transistors are as flexible as human neurons, but it's interesting that we're just getting to the right order of magnitude in terms of quantity assuming they can fill a similar role.
- baz00 3y agoPerhaps I see this as naivety but it feels wrong reading it. A transistor is a really simple functional unit. A neuron is a hugely complex system on its own which is 3 orders of magnitude the size or more and 3d to boot. They are nowhere near functionally equivalent in any way, shape or form. Rationally comparing them is difficult. It's like comparing a light switch to an M3 SoC.
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- hexaga 3y agoIt's worth noting that much of the cellular complexity isn't for information processing (insofar as anything can be 'for' something in biological systems). There's all the implicit self-replication stuff, everything you need to tap into energy / physical resources, self-repair, homeostasis, coexistence with other living cells, etc ad nauseum. In my opinion, that's the interesting axis of comparison (the i/p ability w.r.t. data I care about). I don't particularly care that my transistors can't reproduce or repair themselves from an embedded copy of 'the entire human tech-tree, so far'. > 3 orders of magnitude the size or more and 3d to boot To be fair, transistors are orders of magnitude faster in time than neurons. > It's like comparing a light switch to an M3 SoC. Bird to a plane is the analogy I see a lot around here. It feels apt.
- bognition 3y agoThe morphology (cellular shape) of a neuron absolutely is involved in the processing of information. Additionally neurons aren’t just simple on/off units like we pretend they are. They are complicated little computers. They change their shape, gene expression, and electrical sensitivity in response to environmental factors, chemical signals from other neurons, and internal clocks. They are insanely complicated. While the analogy of light switch compared to an M3 isn’t exactly accurate it does a good job of signaling that neurons and transistors are very much different thjngs.
- xg15 3y agoNot sure if there is an equivalent in English, but I know that an "archaic" German term for computers from the 1940s and 50s is "Elektronengehirn". So the connection has always been always there. Edit: An article about the origin of the term and historic connections/comparisons being made between brains and computers: https://www.nzz.ch/digital/computer-wie-die-elektronenhirne-die-welt-eroberten-ld.1516256 https://www.nzz.ch/digital/computer-wie-die-elektronenhirne-... (in German)
- pxeger1 3y ago(Gehirn = brain)
- tczMUFlmoNk 3y agoThis is also the case in Mandarin, where 电脑 diàn nǎo is literally "electronic brain".
- JohnFen 3y agoIt's also interesting to look back on how people have analogized the functioning of the brain. Before computers, it was analogized as internal combustion engines. Before that, as the belt-and-pully power distribution that was used with water wheels.
- retrac 3y ago"Electronic brain" or "electric brain". Stereotypical 1950s term for a computer. The analogy between the telegraph and the nervous system goes back much further. In 1855, William F. Channing wrote: > The electric telegraph is thus the nervous system of this nation and of modern society by no figure of speech, by no distant analogy. Its wires spread like nerves over the surface of the land, interlinking distant parts, and making possible a perpetually higher co-operation among men, and higher social forms than have hitherto existed. The fact that the nervous system involved electricity in some way, was understood by that time. He was probably not the first to think of the analogy, and it would become common by the late 19th century. [1] William F Channing, "The American Fire-Alarm Telegraph" https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765-bk https://collections.nlm.nih.gov/catalog/nlm:nlmuid-101620765...