4 ms·
Where do they get 10 bits/second? Heck, I can type way faster than 10 bits per second, even after gzipping the output. And when I consider the amount of senso
by crazygringo 2y ago
Where do they get 10 bits/second?
Heck, I can type way faster than 10 bits per second, even after gzipping the output.
And when I consider the amount of sensory information that I consciously process (not that comes in, but that I conceptually analyze), it's got to be way higher.
10 bits/s doesn't pass the smell test.
- GeoAtreides 2y agoThe response to the question of "where do they get 10 bits/second" can be found in the paper, in great detail if I might add.
- crazygringo 2y agoI don't have access. Nor do most of us here probably. Can you share for us then?
- GeoAtreides 2y agothis thread has 20 comments at the time of writing my comment. About two of them contain a link to the full paper, please take a look.
- ziddoap 2y agoIt would be a lot less abrasive to say "It's linked elsewhere, but here it is: https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.10234" or some variation, instead of saying "it's here somewhere, go find it".
- GeoAtreides 2y agowith all due respect, it was meant to be slightly abrasive. it's understandable (?) not finding something when the thread has hundreds of comments, not so much when the thread had like 15-20 comments.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sam1r 2y agoThanks for this. I scrolled for ages hoping for something like this ^
- t-writescode 2y agoI was iterating over the different citations for bitrate, at least some of them, like Starcraft and the Rubik's cube, are literally a Guinness Book of Records that's a tiny blurb about APMs and a video of a guy solving the rubik's cube. Going from APM and/or image wiggling to "bits per second" is .... hilariously reductive and I struggle to consider this response to be woefully incomplete at convincing this reader. And yeah, my immediate response to reading the title was "where the hell are they getting that number", so I have gone and looked and am unsatisfied.
- wat10000 2y agoEnglish is about one bit per letter. If you type at a very fast 120WPM then you’re right at 10bps. Computers just don’t represent English very efficiently, even with gzip.
- formerly_proven 2y ago> English is about one bit per letter.* * when whole sentences or paragraphs are considered.
- wat10000 2y agoWhat else would we consider?
- formerly_proven 2y agoThe symbols aka words of the language itself?
- wat10000 2y agoI’m afraid I don’t understand your point. If someone types English for a minute at 120WPM then they’ll have produced about 600 bits of information. Are you saying we should consider the rate in a smaller window of time? Or we should consider the rate when the typist is producing a series of unrelated English words that don’t form a coherent sentence?
- rvense 2y agoHow do you measure information density of English text?
- wat10000 2y agoYou show a bunch of English speakers some text that’s cut off, and ask them to predict the next letter. Their success at prediction tells you the information content of the text. Shannon ran this experiment and got a result of about 1 bit per letter: https://archive.org/details/bstj30-1-50/page/n5/mode/1up https://archive.org/details/bstj30-1-50/page/n5/mode/1up
- esperent 2y agoFrom the paper: > Quick, think of a thing... Now I’ll guess that thing by asking you yes/no questions.” The game ‘Twenty Questions’ has been popular for centuries1as a thinking challenge. If the questions are properly designed, each will reveal 1 bit of information about the mystery thing. If the guesser wins routinely, this suggests that the thinker can access about 220≈ 1 million possible items in the few seconds allotted. So the speed of thinking – with no constraints imposed – corresponds to 20 bits of information over a few seconds: a rate of 10 bits per second or less.
- andersource 2y agoIf the questions were pre-determined, which they're usually not. Reminds me of Huffman coding and the reason that compression challenges measure submissions looking at artifacts required to run them in addition to compressed size. I tend to agree with OP that this doesn't pass the smell test
- largbae 2y agoSo, in the context of random word lookup with filter for things, we have a latency of a few seconds and a total selection of 20 bits. Meanwhile the machinery in understanding that it is a game, processing the audio input of the question, producing the output of the answer is all taken for granted.
- chongli 2y agoAs the answerer, if you have a wide vocabulary or if you're a technical person then it's not too difficult to routinely choose words the other person simply does not know so that no amount of yes/no questions will get them there. Obscure medical terms (phlebotomy), names of uncommonly-known stars (Fomalhaut), obscure data structures (cache-oblivious lookahead arrays), mathematical constants (Feigenbaum's constants)... The list goes on and on! The point I'm trying to make is that most people who play Twenty Questions aren't trying to maximize the number of bits per second in their answer. They're actually trying to play semi-cooperatively. The fun part of Twenty Questions is when the other person guesses your word with as few questions remaining as possible. Having them get all the way to 20 and then you tell them "no you were way off to guess toothache, it was actually temporomandibular joint dysfunction" makes you look rather unsporting! Thus, since I think we can expect people who play Twenty Questions to actually try to choose a word they know the other person can guess within the space allowed, we can reasonably conclude that using the game as a way to establish some sort of rough constraint on the speed of thinking (in bits per second) is way off. In fact, I know from my own experience playing the game that I will think of and discard many words in a short time as I try to find one that will be in the sweet spot of challenge for the other person to guess.
- tim333 2y agoIt seems weird to me. They say 10/bits/sec "behavioral throughput." Have they not seen a football match? The brain controls 600 or so muscles in a rapid manner. That alone must be a lot of bits per second, certainly far better than computer controlled robots. Re >Why does the brain need billions of neurons to process 10 bits/s? Tesla's FSD cars have a lot of processing power but still struggle not to drive into fire trucks. You probably need a lot.