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Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains?
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Beamin:

--- Quote from: ebastler on February 06, 2021, 11:48:55 am ---
--- Quote from: Beamin 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?

--- End quote ---

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

--- End quote ---

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.
LaserSteve:
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

GlennSprigg:

--- Quote from: Beamin on February 10, 2021, 01:45:09 am ---
--- Quote from: ebastler on February 06, 2021, 11:48:55 am ---
--- Quote from: Beamin 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?

--- End quote ---

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

--- End quote ---

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.

--- End quote ---

Don't put yourself down!! The old C-64 computer had more power than what took men to the Moon !!   8)
S. Petrukhin:
There are people whose flops come from an external kick generator...  :)
And some often require a reboot with a shovel kick.   ;D
hans:
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.
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