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My girlfriend is a neuroscientist. Every time she sees something about them 'modeling the brain' she is visibly amused/unhappy. It might be possible, but our cu

by tibbon 14y ago

My girlfriend is a neuroscientist. Every time she sees something about them 'modeling the brain' she is visibly amused/unhappy. It might be possible, but our current understanding of the brain feels much further away. The concept that we're going to hit some moore's law style thing in science that will propel us to just automatically understand things, which we can barely measure currently, just doesn't line up. Just the process to understand how a single thing functions on a single channel seems to take forever now, and most neuroscience labs aren't limited by the speed of their desktops...

Aqueous 14y ago
Right, it takes forever now - and it took twice as long five years ago.
- tibbon 14y ago
  But the thing is most neuroscientists don't just sit at a computer all day. 95% of the tasks they do are not computer-bound. If you're doing animal-based research (the majority of real neuroscience currently), then its time spent with behavior testing, surgeries, waiting for the drug to be in an animal for 72 (or however many) hours, processing slides, pipetting, etc. The time spent at a computer is mostly data analysis, reading papers, ordering supplies and grantwriting. A huge amount of time seems to be spent jumping through hoops, ordering things, working with vendors of equipment that doesn't frequently work as advertised, and dealing with broken stuff overall. The data-analysis they are doing again, isn't bound by the computer's speed. It generally is working with a few dozen (or hundred) samples of relatively computationally easy data. There's not much for a computer to speed up.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
bmh100 14y ago
On the other hand, I believe we did see exponential growth in our ability to both automatically drive cars, to automatically translate text, and in voice recognition. If we consider 1958 to be a good starting point for self-driving cars (http://technologizer.com/2010/10/09/google-self-driving-cars/ http://technologizer.com/2010/10/09/google-self-driving-cars...), might we say that Google's car is orders of magnitude more powerful than those of 1986? If we consider 1954 a starting point for machine translation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_machine_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_machine_translation), again might we find that Google Translate is similarly in a different league than SYSTRAN of the 1980s? I do not really have the knowledge and sources to back those claims up, so I have to frame them as opinions for now. Could someone with experiences or deeper knowledge about these areas weigh in?

by tibbon 14y ago

Aqueous 14y ago

Right, it takes forever now - and it took twice as long five years ago.

tibbon 14y ago
But the thing is most neuroscientists don't just sit at a computer all day. 95% of the tasks they do are not computer-bound. If you're doing animal-based research (the majority of real neuroscience currently), then its time spent with behavior testing, surgeries, waiting for the drug to be in an animal for 72 (or however many) hours, processing slides, pipetting, etc. The time spent at a computer is mostly data analysis, reading papers, ordering supplies and grantwriting. A huge amount of time seems to be spent jumping through hoops, ordering things, working with vendors of equipment that doesn't frequently work as advertised, and dealing with broken stuff overall. The data-analysis they are doing again, isn't bound by the computer's speed. It generally is working with a few dozen (or hundred) samples of relatively computationally easy data. There's not much for a computer to speed up.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

bmh100 14y ago

On the other hand, I believe we did see exponential growth in our ability to both automatically drive cars, to automatically translate text, and in voice recognition. If we consider 1958 to be a good starting point for self-driving cars (http://technologizer.com/2010/10/09/google-self-driving-cars/ http://technologizer.com/2010/10/09/google-self-driving-cars...), might we say that Google's car is orders of magnitude more powerful than those of 1986? If we consider 1954 a starting point for machine translation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_machine_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_machine_translation), again might we find that Google Translate is similarly in a different league than SYSTRAN of the 1980s? I do not really have the knowledge and sources to back those claims up, so I have to frame them as opinions for now. Could someone with experiences or deeper knowledge about these areas weigh in?