I imagine a group of dogs sitting around and asking "How are we so good at thinking about fun ways to play with squeeky toys?".
The truth is, that our ability to reason about ourselves is limited by our ability to reason. Perhaps there are aliens out there who would laugh our cognitive abilities--their's being so much better than ours.
One kind of efficiency which hasn't been talked about is the energy loss of things like state switching and keeping the current state enabled. I think that brains build on much more efficient primitives than the silicon transistors computer chips use and thus can perform far more computations for far less energy than a desktop CPU.
Another difference between CPUs and brains is that brains are much less general purpose. CPUs do run-time interpreting of instructions while brains process data in a more straightforward way like GPUs do. Many problems can be implemented into GPUs and they will run much faster. I'd argue that brains excel at such tasks while being harder at tasks that require lots of state to be kept around as well as conditional jumps like computing a hash function or compiling a program. CPUs excel at those tasks.
Why is the human brain so inefficient? It takes years just for it to compute the sha-256 of this media file.
See discussion from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16895124
I was wondering why this seemed so outdated and ignorant for something published in 2018 (only 10b transistors? 'computers are serial', really?), but I see that it's from a 2015 textbook, using citations for computing hardware published in 2008, and presumably referencing hardware from 2007 or earlier...
"At a global level, the architectures of the brain and the computer resemble each other, consisting of largely separate circuits for input, output, central processing, and memory."
This is fundamentally wrong, even at the 10 mile high summary level.
In our brain processing and memory are not in the least bit separate, and memory distinct from processing doesn't really exist.
If you really had to make a computer analogy of how the brain works, it's more like self-modifying code where the only memory of the data flowing through it is the changes to the code that were made as the result of that prior flow.
Leslie Valiant has done some interesting work on quantifying the efficiency of the brain from the viewpoint of computer science, see e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9hRRh76QEA and the book Circuits of the Mind.
World record tennis serve is 144 miles an hour and a human can't really move across a court and return a ball moving at this speed. If they're lucky they can reach it and react in time to hit it. I'm a bit confused by an article that claims tennis players can react to and return serves up to 160 miles an hour. I think evidence suggests that returning balls anywhere near this fast is dependent on analysing factors before the ball starts moving, the other players body position, racket position etc. Players have an intuition about where the ball is going to go without having to look at and analyse the flight of the ball.
Just did some very basic checking. Tennis court 23m 260mph = 72m/s Ball takes approx. 0.3ms to travel length of court. human reaction time to visual simulous 0.25ms So the idea is they move and hit the ball in the remaining 0.05ms? Hmmmmm.
I wouldn't say that human brain is that efficient (per volume). Compare and contrast with the brain of rats or Corvidae: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZerUbHmuY04.
The brain is weird. You can figure out how to split an atom, then forget your keys inside your car.
Is it though?
I think having a good metric is really hard.
For example i can have a neural net running on my smartphone doing recognition tasks.
A task the brain is typically good at due to its neural net structure while the computer basically has to simulate the net.
But still my smartphone can mark all the faces in a crowd multiple times over in a time i can not recognize even a single person.
And that with a camera way beyond the capabilities of the human eye.
Modern smartphone processors draw around 1 or 2 watt max. So is my phone more efficient at doing this?
One could argue that my brain does other stuff at the same time like controlling heartbeat and what not but my phone has to keep the wifi, clock and so on too.
The truly impressive part is the ability of the brain to do completely generic problem solving for basically everything; while running on 10 watt. With the added ability to learn a few activities to a really high level.
Its is not efficient at doing a singular thing it is efficient doing everything at once.
I feel uncomfortable at the ubiquitous, silent assumption that what is marketed as AI is a computer implementation of a brain.
I see how the term neuronal network reinforces this believe, but we (especially the researchers among us) should allow for the possibility that we are missing something.
Cool article!!
I don't know.
This article contains inaccuracies and says almost nothing novel for your average hacker new reader.
They aren't the same thing. They are different classes of objects, different tasks. This comparison is kind of silly.
I'd hate my computer to have the memory accuracy or the computational accuracy of my brain. I'd hate to have the creativity and inspiration of a computer.
Delete being such a nontrivial operation is probably a good thing for humans. Copy being imperfect probably has something to do with the phenomenon we call imagination. We use computers because they are complementary, not substitutive.
They're just so fundamentally different.