The brain is a remarkable computational device (not material? bah. get your faith out of my office.) A rough estimate of the computational power needed to simulate the brain’s neural power is around a billion MIPs (millions of instructions per second.) When I was growing up, I was fascinated by the possibilities of artificial intelligence. In fact, this forms the basis of my three ways to do theoretical physics:<\/p>\n
But back to the topic at hand: simulating the human brain. One problem with an analysis that just looks at the raw computational speed of the human brain is that it disregards the computational complexity inherit in the structure of the brain itself. In particular, the brain is the product of 500 million plus years of evolution (I want to start counting from at least some ancestor which had some sort of nervous system). So the question I’ve always found fascinating is how large this overhead of so many years of evolution costs in producing the structure of the brain? Do we need to simulate all 500 million plus years of evolution, yielding a computational power far beyond even our best projections of the computational power of the brain? This is particularly troublesome when you think about the power of evolution: our ancestors have been roaming around the landscape of possible brains for a long long time. A counter to this is the idea that we don’t need to simulate all of the evolution, but only the developemental biology which leads to a full grown human. This later point of view seems less computationally challenging, but still daunting. And I’ll bet that this is the computational hangup for simulating human intelligence: not the raw power of the brain, the but the power to reproduce the developement of the brain. I wonder if anyone has done any rough calculations on the computatonal power needed for this latter task.
\nAs I said, when I was growing up, I was fascinated by the possibility of advanced computer intelligences. I can still remember the frustration of not being able to produce intelligence on my TRS-80 Color Computer II. So I left those dreams behind me, but I promised myself that if I ever thought computers were powerful enough to really start producing intelligence I would return to the field. I guess you shouldn’t be surprised, then, if in thirty years you find me hacking away in some dark basement beside a machine named “Newton.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The brain is a remarkable computational device (not material? bah. get your faith out of my office.) A rough estimate of the computational power needed to simulate the brain’s neural power is around a billion MIPs (millions of instructions per second.) When I was growing up, I was fascinated by the possibilities of artificial intelligence. … <\/p>\n