Brain power versus computer power.

Dofuss3000

Golden Member
Feb 10, 2001
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How does a brain process information versus a computer?

How powerful is a brain?

I heard that the fastest super computer known to the public can process 360 TeraFLOPS.
 

Calin

Diamond Member
Apr 9, 2001
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A brain uses something called neuronal networks for "processing" data. Those networks are not digital in nature, but analog. The neural networks in the brain can be trained to many tasks (this is called learning).
In the realm of artificial inteligence, the computers are not even close to the level of the humans - but this might be because of the AI code.
The best chess computer was able to beat the best human player - but in the game of Go, the computers are put to shame by human players
 

TuxDave

Lifer
Oct 8, 2002
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Yeah, but what computer can decipher words in a scrambled picture faster than a human? Humans are the fastest image processing units in the world so far.
 

Matthias99

Diamond Member
Oct 7, 2003
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At an EXTREMELY broad level:

Digital computers do lots of VERY fast, VERY simple mathematical operations. When it comes to crunching numbers, nothing else we have even comes close. The problem is that anything else we might want them to do has to be translated, at some level, into crunching numbers -- which is often exceedingly inefficient, and for some problems is basically intractable.

Humans, frankly, suck at performing computation -- but that's because millions of years of evolution have turned us into pattern-recognizing and audiovisual processing machines (so to speak). We seem to have quite a knack with communication and languages as well. And our synesthetic and kinetic processing (in terms of taking sensory input and using it to guide and plan the movement of our body) is incredibly sophisticated, easily equal to or better than the best robotics technology out there today (although a lot of that is hardwired into our muscles/nerves; our 'reflexes' are very well-designed to keep us from falling over, etc.)

The biggest advantage of computers, frankly, is that you can build and modify them cheaply (whereas humans are a fairly scarce/expensive resource by comparison), and you can program them to do any sort of computation without much loss in efficiency (humans are always going to do very well at certain things and poorly at others). It's very difficult, however, to compare processing capability between a human brain and a digital computer, because they work so differently and our brains do so many things in parallel. You can count instructions in a computer program and see how long it takes to execute; there is no comparable atomic unit of 'thought' that you could measure to see how 'much' someone's brain is doing (well, at least, there isn't yet).
 

jagec

Lifer
Apr 30, 2004
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Originally posted by: Matthias99
The biggest advantage of computers, frankly, is that you can build and modify them cheaply (whereas humans are a fairly scarce/expensive resource by comparison),

Not in the third world:p
 

Gannon

Senior member
Jul 29, 2004
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I think one has to remember computers are very specialized for a specific task, Brains and CPU's are not comparable in a fundamental way, sure they both can do math, but there is a significant difference. Machines no matter what kind of equipment we give them are never truly self-aware entities, they are mathematical models programmed into their foundations of hardaware and software, even the ones that "learn" aren't truly "Aware", they are just processing meaningless data in ways we told them to interpret it. Brains are conscious living things capable of adaptation, re-orginization and self-repair, CPU's are not. CPU's also don't have to worry about their users feeding them crap components via their diet during their growth and abusing the 'processing circuitry', they also don't have to worry about temperature and the different "dirty" and unpredictable environments brains have to work in. All the materials for a CPU are 'best of breed' available at the time and handpicked by specialists, to perform the specialized tasks they were designed for. So whenever CPU's advance, just remember they didn't evolve from the original chips through a process of evolutionary re-orginization, they started over from scratch with different tools and materials every time. So in this way computing power can't be directly comparable to human brains because, the materials, tools, and designs are radically different from one another, so different they have to start over and use new blank slates rather then fixing or re-organizing the original.

A computers power is meaningless without humans to tell them what is which. To give them the proper equations and mathematics and make templates for them to make it 's ultimate output into a humanly understandable or usable form that services some purpose, design or need of ours. The design foundation or framework for a computer to do things comes from us, without us they couldn't do what they will eventually do. I'm sure sometime in the future AI and hybrid AI (biological+artificial) intelligence will be common place, each specialized to do a particular task.

It is obvious that the brain is a computational and mathematical machine, it just works in a fundamentally different manner. Language encoding and decoding is mathematical process, so even if humans are not very fast at math, their brain does do some seriously fast mathematical computations they are not consciously aware of, especially in relation to vision processing encoding and decoding of images. If you've ever been to the eye doctor, to check your eyes sometimes he squirts this liquid on your eyes which makes the bloodvessels on your eyes appear to your sight, normally your mind naturally filters these blood vessels obstructing your vision out with a mathematical algorithm so the 'artifacts' don't disrupt your normal vision function.

The brain is very good at doing very complex processing: for instance, we can make sense of the odd jumble of shapes and shadows we are looking at and recognize it as a face. We can recognize the shapes that make up a coffee mug, despite having never seen it before from that precise angle, and we can work out how far away it is and how to pick it up. We can track a person walking across a crowded room, and we can disentangle what they are saying from the hubbub around them. We can work out where a sound is coming from, despite the fact that echoes of the same sound are coming from all directions off the surrounding walls.

All these processes are complex. The tasks mentioned may seem easy to you, but that is only because you are using a frighteningly sophisticated bit of processing technology to help you do them - your brain. It would, for instance, be very difficult to program a computer to do the same things: computer scientists have made a start on this, but at the turn of the millennium, artificial seeing and hearing systems are no match for the brain of even a simple animal. This is because we don't know much about how the brain is doing it. Psychophysicists aim to find out how exactly the brain works.

Computers have finite resources just like human beings so ultimately computers can only compute (and eventually understand) what their finite capacity allows even if it eventually is much more then human beings, it is still finite and limited to the degree that nature allows.
 

housecat

Banned
Oct 20, 2004
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This is so interesting...


anyway, its my assumption that the human brain cannot be touched by any computer. They only have an advantage in numbers.. everything else is our ballgame.

Even in the best comparison situation IMHO, which is a chess match.. we end up defeating the machines 50% of the time.

I think Chess is prob the best way for our brains and machines to compete for supremacy.. in the way that most are interested in.

It will be a very long time until machines are building other machines and acting as humans. And thats the biggest flaw, they have no creativity yet.

I am not saying to match the creativity of mankind would be that hard at all.
Most humans cannot even fathom the existence of a God or higher power..
for many it is merely, WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get).

Adaptive AI certainly is not impossible though, and someday they might be inventing machines and technologies for us.




I like to think of computers/machines as EXTENSIONS of the human mind.
Merely our tools.
Not competition or even comparable.. because they are no competition (until you meet the Terminator), and they are not comparable.
Besides maybe in the chess situation, but even there- the machines number crunching and logical path programming is defeated by its own lack of creativity.
 

steppjr78

Junior Member
Jan 24, 2005
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I am a fan of QBT, Quantum brain theory. Basically it says that our brain is a quantum computer and does act in a digital manor. But instead of 1 and 0 it has three stages just like a quantum computer. It says that thought happens at the microtubule level, MT, and not the neuron level. MT?s encapsulate ever neuron. The theory helps explain why we seem to have an infinite memory capacity in a finite space and slot more. it is cool to read about so I would check it out of I were you