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I'm sitting in on Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind class, and he keeps reminding us that MASSIVE PARALLELISM IS NOT THE INTERESTING ASPECT OF THE MIND. Think ab
by lsb 18y ago
I'm sitting in on Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind class, and he keeps reminding us that MASSIVE PARALLELISM IS NOT THE INTERESTING ASPECT OF THE MIND.
Think about playing chess. Each move, there's 30 branches to follow. If you have a million machines, you can evaluate about 2 moves ahead before parallelism runs out. If you have bad branch prediction, you'll follow all the wrong paths.
Humans beat machines at creative endeavors because computers don't know what branches to follow. There was nothing interesting about the implementation of Deep Blue. It would be like implementing the Internet by shipping immense hard drives around to convey information: brute force, unintelligent, and immensely successful at delivering throughput.
We process information much slower than CPUs (how fast can _you_ read Wikipedia?), but we know when to give up, we know when to follow an interesting path, we know how to move processing to the subconscious.
- queensnake 18y agoHe gives it as a class? Any links, or footage...? There's nothing from his homepage. Too bad, his live presentation should be recorded.
- sown 18y agoBiology is very much a show-me science and I've always wondered about Society of Mind ... what's his proof? I mean seriously, is it all just reasoned out? Is it like philosophy?
- Drewcifus 17y agoYa know what, I dunno why you guys are all philosophising about all this stuff, as opposed to just having it BUILT ALREADY. I mean really, what does it take? So you take the ATX motherboard design, and scrap it. It's crazy old anyways. And if you can grow, or create graphene in a controlled environment, WHY does the graphene have to be a "CPU only" material? Why not use it for RAM, GPUs, and Cache??? I mean really. And this is what I want to know... WHERE is Intel in all of this. THEY are the major chip-maker of planet earth. It's not like they don't have the money to build a new architecture for graphene. It's not like they can't build a proper fabrication plant. So WHY isn't MIT working with Intel on this one...? Duh.
- seanb 18y agoSure, but it's the massive parallelism of the hardware behind "the mind" that allows a human to intelligently filter information quickly. Our serial conscious thought is in no way indicative of the amount of (parallel) processing that goes on behind the scenes in order to make a "simple" decision.