21 ms·

The human mind is highly parallel. Anything that approaches it in intelligence will also be highly parallel. Even if clock speeds were a million times faster,

by russell 17y ago

The human mind is highly parallel. Anything that approaches it in intelligence will also be highly parallel. Even if clock speeds were a million times faster, parallel would be the only way to manage the complexity. The clock speed of a neuron is only 5ms and we do pretty well.

frisco 17y ago
The "clock speed" of a neuron is actually closer to 50ms-100ms (only about 10-20Hz for meaningful purposes) -- but you have about 100 billion of them, and they're all working in parallel. The brain's building blocks are really slow relative to silicon; action potentials move at speeds measured in m/s.
swolchok 17y ago
That's parallelism at the "micro" level. Compare it to the parallelism in superscalar or EPIC processors (incidentally, EPIC is also hard to take advantage of). This argument doesn't show that many-core architecture is necessarily going to help.
- randallsquared 17y ago
  If you can put enough processors and memory close enough, it seems as though you should be able to model a few hundred or thousand neurons on each processor, to assume the worst case. We've already moved past the need for neuron-level parallelism, so from here on the question is what order of magnitude of neurons can be modeled on a single processor. (Again, assuming the worst case that we have to model neurons to get intelligent systems before we can figure out exactly how to produce intelligence in a less simulation-oriented manner).
goodside 17y ago
"The human mind is highly parallel. Anything that approaches it in intelligence will also be highly parallel." Birds fly by flapping their wings. Any man-made object that approaches the flying ability of a bird will also flap its wings.
- Confusion 17y ago
  That analogy fails, because man-made objects have not yet approached the flying ability of birds (or insects). Man-made flying objects are highly energy inefficient and slow and clumsy as a result. We cannot make something that flies like a bird or something that flies like an insect.

by russell 17y ago

frisco 17y ago

The "clock speed" of a neuron is actually closer to 50ms-100ms (only about 10-20Hz for meaningful purposes) -- but you have about 100 billion of them, and they're all working in parallel. The brain's building blocks are really slow relative to silicon; action potentials move at speeds measured in m/s.

swolchok 17y ago

That's parallelism at the "micro" level. Compare it to the parallelism in superscalar or EPIC processors (incidentally, EPIC is also hard to take advantage of). This argument doesn't show that many-core architecture is necessarily going to help.

randallsquared 17y ago
If you can put enough processors and memory close enough, it seems as though you should be able to model a few hundred or thousand neurons on each processor, to assume the worst case. We've already moved past the need for neuron-level parallelism, so from here on the question is what order of magnitude of neurons can be modeled on a single processor. (Again, assuming the worst case that we have to model neurons to get intelligent systems before we can figure out exactly how to produce intelligence in a less simulation-oriented manner).

goodside 17y ago

"The human mind is highly parallel. Anything that approaches it in intelligence will also be highly parallel." Birds fly by flapping their wings. Any man-made object that approaches the flying ability of a bird will also flap its wings.

Confusion 17y ago
That analogy fails, because man-made objects have not yet approached the flying ability of birds (or insects). Man-made flying objects are highly energy inefficient and slow and clumsy as a result. We cannot make something that flies like a bird or something that flies like an insect.