Author Topic: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?  (Read 5379 times)

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Offline BeaminTopic starter

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Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« on: February 06, 2021, 01:48:29 am »
If our brains were computers what would the clock speed be? How many flops per second could it produce, and how much ram/cache and drive space would it need figuring 30-40 years old?

What would be the difference in some one with an IQ of 80 and 140(conveniently my average IQ) or some one with 170 like Einstein?

 
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Offline Melt-O-Tronic

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #1 on: February 06, 2021, 02:02:41 am »
What's the length of a snake's stride?
 
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Offline vad

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #2 on: February 06, 2021, 02:08:59 am »
An average person can’t perform simple arithmetic operations on arbitrary singe-precious floating point numbers in memory. So I would say 0 FLOPS in memory, ~0.02 FLOPS with paper and pencil, ~0.2 FLOPS with scientific calculator, and up-to 1 exaFLOPS with modern computer.
 

Offline DrG

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #3 on: February 06, 2021, 02:10:03 am »
If our brains were computers what would the clock speed be? How many flops per second could it produce, and how much ram/cache and drive space would it need figuring 30-40 years old?

What would be the difference in some one with an IQ of 80 and 140(conveniently my average IQ) or some one with 170 like Einstein?

 

I'm afraid that my answer is going to disappoint, but here goes:

When this kind of question is asked, it usually gets answered in terms of neural conduction. IOW how long does it take for a neuron to fire...the time from being activated to the time to activate the next neuron or muscle or whatever. It depends on a lot of factors, but you can look these up on Wikiwonderful https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocity

Even the fastest ones are very slow compared to the kinds of standards and measures you are bringing up.

I have never read any evidence at all that a healthy person with a lower IQ has slower neurons than one with higher IQ - it just doesn't work that way.

But, that should not bother you at all because the fastest computers were designed and built and programmed by human brains :)
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Offline JohnnyMalaria

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #4 on: February 06, 2021, 02:22:01 am »
How many MFLOPS must a computer achieve before it can simply just know instinctively it exists?

And why denigrate the extraordinary reality that is your consciousness by comparing it to a how fast a bunch of NAND gates can respond to electrical impulses?

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« Last Edit: February 06, 2021, 02:24:02 am by JohnnyMalaria »
 
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Offline amyk

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #5 on: February 06, 2021, 02:33:07 am »
Biological brains are more like FPGAs, with self-reconfiguration. ;)

Massively parallel but not fast at sequential tasks.
 
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Offline JohnnyMalaria

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #6 on: February 06, 2021, 02:42:54 am »
Biological brains are more like FPGAs, with self-reconfiguration. ;)

Massively parallel but not fast at sequential tasks.

Self-reconfiguration and self-recognition.
 

Offline MK14

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Offline alpher

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #8 on: February 06, 2021, 03:38:30 am »
If our brains were computers what would the clock speed be? How many flops per second could it produce, and how much ram/cache and drive space would it need figuring 30-40 years old?

What would be the difference in some one with an IQ of 80 and 140(conveniently my average IQ) or some one with 170 like Einstein?

 

But, that should not bother you at all because the fastest computers were designed and built and programmed by human brains :)

Are you sure?
And I don't mean aliens etc. Just curious if isn't AI playing a role there?
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #9 on: February 06, 2021, 04:45:52 am »
This is one of those problems of comparing apples to cows.  One way to come up with an answer is to see how many FLOPS or TeraFLOPS it takes to perform comparable tasks to the human brain.  Right now there are no electronic computers that can do everything the human brain does, but Deep Blue plays chess and Jeopardy at somewhat above human levels and vision systems can do some significant parts of what the human brain does.  Various sources rate Deep Blue at 10 to 100 GFLOPS  (the differences are due to ongoing upgrades, but the ratings aren't well tied to the chess or Jeopardy successes).

Many of the other functions of the brain (keeping the heart and lungs going, doing balance and motion and so on) aren't particularly challenging.  As ATLAS and other robots have demonstrated relatively modest computing power is required. 

The open question is how much computing power is required for consciousness.  No one can answer that.  May be more or less than playing Jeopardy.

The following paper has some interesting ways to estimate the equivalence and comes up with much larger numbers

https://www.openphilanthropy.org/brain-computation-report

 

Offline retiredfeline

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #10 on: February 06, 2021, 04:51:28 am »
10 flops per project.  :-DD
 
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Offline helius

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #11 on: February 06, 2021, 05:21:33 am »
Somewhere around 10 Hz to globally synchronize. Submodules can tune in to finer divisions of time, for instance in playing or listening to music.

In terms of "FLOPS" (floating point operations per second) perhaps 0.0001, with external storage? Testing is easy, just multiply two 20-digit decimal fractions in your head :)
Rare individuals called "calculating savants" can do much faster, of course.
 

Offline emece67

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #12 on: February 06, 2021, 09:22:27 am »
.
« Last Edit: August 19, 2022, 04:14:39 pm by emece67 »
 
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Offline ebastler

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #13 on: February 06, 2021, 11:48:55 am »
If our brains were computers what would the clock speed be? How many flops per second could it produce, and how much ram/cache and drive space would it need figuring 30-40 years old?

What would be the difference in some one with an IQ of 80 and 140(conveniently my average IQ) or some one with 170 like Einstein?

Reads like a thinly veiled "Let me brag about my claimed IQ" post...  ::)
I will resist debating the merits of the claim.
 

Offline Syntax Error

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #14 on: February 06, 2021, 12:23:22 pm »
First, do your head in reading about the brain's transistor, the neuron. Then decide if the FLOP is a valid analogy?

http://www.tulane.edu/~h0Ward/BrLg/Neuron.html

Extract:
Quote
Keyes (1985) raises the question of what makes a good computational device, and answers with three desiderata. A “good” computational system is one that survives in the real world, for which it (i) must operate at high speeds, in order to anticipate and react to a fast-changing environment, (ii) must have a rich repertoire of computational primitives, in order to have a wide range of responses, and (iii) must interface with the physical world, in order to represent sensory input accurately and decide on appropriate motor output.
 

Offline helius

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #15 on: February 06, 2021, 11:28:13 pm »
Reads like a thinly veiled "Let me brag about my claimed IQ" post...  ::)
And "FLOPS per second" is pleonasm.
 

Offline NiHaoMike

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #16 on: February 07, 2021, 04:25:51 am »
Here are a bunch of videos to answer all sorts of questions about neuroscience:
https://www.youtube.com/c/neurotransmissions/videos
Reads like a thinly veiled "Let me brag about my claimed IQ" post...  ::)
Which is a very "synthetic" benchmark anyways. Even just within the realm of electronics engineering, there are so many specializations that no single test can fully explore one's skills.
Biological brains are more like FPGAs, with self-reconfiguration. ;)

Massively parallel but not fast at sequential tasks.
That basically means that unless there's a major brain defect, the potential intelligence at a given age probably doesn't vary much between individuals and it's really a question of how well the "programming" can use it. And what it's "optimized" to do, for that matter.
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Offline james_s

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #17 on: February 07, 2021, 04:54:48 am »
The brain is analog and is not architected anything like a computer so I don't know how you'd ever really make this comparison. As someone else said, massively parallel and recofigurable but not really very fast. There are some things that computers really struggle at that are trivial even for a person of below average intelligence, like identifying spam from legitimate email or spotting recognizable objects in a complex image. Other things like solving mathematical equations a computer can do vastly faster than the most gifted human minds. A brain is not running code, it's not executing instructions, it's more like a fully analog FPGA.
 

Offline GlennSprigg

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #18 on: February 07, 2021, 12:36:16 pm »
The brain is analog and is not architected anything like a computer so I don't know how you'd ever really make this comparison. As someone else said, massively parallel and recofigurable but not really very fast. There are some things that computers really struggle at that are trivial even for a person of below average intelligence, like identifying spam from legitimate email or spotting recognizable objects in a complex image. Other things like solving mathematical equations a computer can do vastly faster than the most gifted human minds. A brain is not running code, it's not executing instructions, it's more like a fully analog FPGA.

I don't understand how the brain can be said to be 'analog' ??
It's more like a 'CPU' that's variably integrated within RAM. And it surely multi-tasks, when at the same time as
controlling sub-conscious things like heart rate, body temperature etc etc, it can decipher what we READ, or are reading
at the same time as feel & react to stimulus like a mosquito biting, and interrupting voices  being heard/comprehended!
Is that a 'parallel' system, or are there equivalent 'processor' Interrupts, to pause and re-direct!!

I've been recently reading about so-called 'Speed-Reading'. There is a delay while the brain has to control our eyes, to
scan across words in a sentence. And our brain also luckily does not have to read the individual 'letters', as we are now
accustomed to see each word as a 'Picture', and know what it is.  The problem though, is that even if/when our 'brain'
is correctly 'interpreting' the words it has stored, we are NOT necessarily RETAINING the information properly, when a
certain speed of 'reading' has been crossed. (Proportionally).  At that point, our 'brain' Flops, have Flopped!!   :-X
Diagonal of 1x1 square = Root-2. Ok.
Diagonal of 1x1x1 cube = Root-3 !!!  Beautiful !!
 

Offline james_s

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #19 on: February 08, 2021, 01:17:28 am »
I don't understand how the brain can be said to be 'analog' ??
It's more like a 'CPU' that's variably integrated within RAM. And it surely multi-tasks, when at the same time as
controlling sub-conscious things like heart rate, body temperature etc etc, it can decipher what we READ, or are reading
at the same time as feel & react to stimulus like a mosquito biting, and interrupting voices  being heard/comprehended!
Is that a 'parallel' system, or are there equivalent 'processor' Interrupts, to pause and re-direct!!

Well would you argue that it's binary? Or hexadecimal? Or something else? Neurons have variable response, as far as I know they are not either on or off like a digital bit and the brain doesn't really deal in numerical values natively. There are no discrete brightness steps the eye can detect for example, the more photons hit the receptor cell in the retina the more strongly it reacts. There is no analog to digital conversion between our sensory and the brain, it is directly connected. The brain isn't executing instructions, it is more like a massively parallel collection of analog circuits that are all wired up to do whatever task they do, many of these can be monitored or controlled to various degrees with our conscious mind. We can only really focus on one thing at a time but other things can grab our focus, but there are many things that can operate with some autonomy in the background.
 
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Offline BeaminTopic starter

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #20 on: February 10, 2021, 01:45:09 am »
If our brains were computers what would the clock speed be? How many flops per second could it produce, and how much ram/cache and drive space would it need figuring 30-40 years old?

What would be the difference in some one with an IQ of 80 and 140(conveniently my average IQ) or some one with 170 like Einstein?

Reads like a thinly veiled "Let me brag about my claimed IQ" post...  ::)
I will resist debating the merits of the claim.

Im sure many on this board are above my IQ. This is why I like this board so much I feel intellectually humble, and its fun to pick the brains that are smarter then mine. Some people here are way  above my head and I have to spend 5-10 minutes googling their posts just to understand what they are talking about. I think my brain has an 8086 ( at 3.4 MHz, the switch to 7 is broken) in it with a broken math co-processor, and 64k ram; 60 of which is used up to keep me breathing and standing upright. And the real time clock battery is leaking.
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Offline LaserSteve

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #21 on: February 10, 2021, 03:18:12 am »
The challenge i like to give to undergraduates on our robotics team is how many lines of code do you need to fully emulate an ant,  then accurately  run a puppy.  I don't know the answer, nor how you cram an Atmel 328 into an ant.

Throw in dolphin or bat FM-CW Sonar Imaging  to make it even more interesting.  FM-CW is a rudimentary mode for both species, actual waveforms used are far more sophisticated.

Usually that gets me a very puzzled look from the freshmen, and mirth from the seniors, who know I don't expect an answer. Team is a mix of CE, EE. Comp Sci, ME and some marketing students.

Steve

« Last Edit: February 10, 2021, 03:25:00 am by LaserSteve »
"When in doubt, check the Byte order of the Communications Protocol, By Hand, On an Oscilloscope"

Quote from a co-inventor of the PLC, whom i had the honor of working with recently.
 
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Offline GlennSprigg

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #22 on: February 10, 2021, 11:38:28 am »
If our brains were computers what would the clock speed be? How many flops per second could it produce, and how much ram/cache and drive space would it need figuring 30-40 years old?

What would be the difference in some one with an IQ of 80 and 140(conveniently my average IQ) or some one with 170 like Einstein?

Reads like a thinly veiled "Let me brag about my claimed IQ" post...  ::)
I will resist debating the merits of the claim.

Im sure many on this board are above my IQ. This is why I like this board so much I feel intellectually humble, and its fun to pick the brains that are smarter then mine. Some people here are way  above my head and I have to spend 5-10 minutes googling their posts just to understand what they are talking about. I think my brain has an 8086 ( at 3.4 MHz, the switch to 7 is broken) in it with a broken math co-processor, and 64k ram; 60 of which is used up to keep me breathing and standing upright. And the real time clock battery is leaking.

Don't put yourself down!! The old C-64 computer had more power than what took men to the Moon !!   8)
Diagonal of 1x1 square = Root-2. Ok.
Diagonal of 1x1x1 cube = Root-3 !!!  Beautiful !!
 

Offline S. Petrukhin

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #23 on: February 10, 2021, 12:23:18 pm »
There are people whose flops come from an external kick generator...  :)
And some often require a reboot with a shovel kick.   ;D
And sorry for my English.
 

Offline hans

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Re: Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
« Reply #24 on: February 10, 2021, 02:37:11 pm »
Comparing performance measures of different architectures is hard, or even useless, because they are not the same.

In that sense, even IQ is debatable whether it really represents anything. Some IQ tests include language, numbers, etc. Does it also mean that people who have dyslexia or dyscalculia are dumber? I doubt both should have an effect on the score, however, the way they consume and process information is 'different'. Herein lies a crucial observation that expressing IQ as a scalar value is kind of useless: some people have perfect memory while others can string together many different concepts while needing to look up everything they use.

As far as I read into, I believe that IQ is a weighted average of several of these factors. Important pillars of good IQ performance are then short and long term memory and the ability to associate different concepts with the observations presented at present time. I think the latter is quite a fundamental measure of 'brain performance', as learning and understanding is basically all about it.

Then trying to compare brain vs computers becomes hard. Computers have memory storage expressed in bytes and computational power often expressed in FLOPS. However, in a sense even our human cognitive computations are also associations. We have learned that the numbers go like [1, 2, 3, 4], etc. and we have learned what the mechanics of addition, subtraction or multiplication is (e.g. that 2-1=1). However, if one had learned that numbers went like [1, 3, 2, 4], then he/she may still be able to perform computations quickly (e.g. 2-1=3), but perhaps not correct to our typical conventions. Likewise in computers, 2's complement is not the only way of storing an integer, and relearning number systems and observing redundant number systems is quite an interesting philosophy on how we can treat computations more efficiently.

What I mean to say is; the concepts we treat as cognitive computational power are, in a sense, also memory lookups of a convention that we take for granted. The brain is a huge association machine, which is more like a massive FPGA with lots of block RAM spread around..
In terms of the processing the brain does to give us consciousness is far in excess what a typical computer will do, especially relative to the energy the brain consumes. If you only look at the visual cortex and the speed at which we recognize objects at different illumination levels, orientations and shape variants... it's very very impressive. We probably need far far more powerful computers to even come close to matching it.
« Last Edit: February 10, 2021, 02:39:17 pm by hans »
 


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