Will Computers Outsmart Humans In 40 years?

Originally posted by beyondSciFi

Er I think your math is off... 100 billion x 1,000 x 200 = 20,000,000 billion calculations per sec or 20 petaflops not 100 teraflops. SO... there wont be any computer to outdo the human brain FLOPS wise for 20-40 years... But remember computers are good at just crunching number, just deciding to pick up a pen is more complex for your brain then for a computer to find 379 to the 51th power. (Just an example)

But you must also consider that no ones Brain is processing 100 teraflops of information a second much less 20 petaflops , your Brain would overheat.

i think in 40 years we will have computers in our heads, which would be nice.. then i could surf pages and type at the same time.. and yes i would still type.. i get a certain satisfaction from the tactile sensations of typing

imagine if you will this... a network of nano-technology, a neural-net if you will.. structured the way a human brain is (which is essentially what a neural net is) add to this the ability to access an infinite well of all human knowledge (the internet). what you will get is the paralled calculation power of the human brain, coupled with the superior power of the computers ability to calculate sequentially.
this will give you a computing power much much higher than the human brain.
the thing missing from this equation, which gives us an advantage over our computer counterpart, is the ability to process intangible knowledge. Things such as philosphy and religion which are unique to the human brain. yes the neural net would have access to these theories and such on the internet, but it does not possess the power to discern them.

this is what would be the difference between man and machine in the future, ie a soul, whatever you would want to call it.

computers may even become self-aware of themselves and be able to make rational decisions based on their calculations. but they will never obtain the ability to discern in the realms of morality, philosphy, and religion, because these are inherently intangible forms of knowledge.

Originally posted by lost_shaman

Originally posted by beyondSciFi

Er I think your math is off...

But you must also consider that no ones Brain is processing 100 teraflops of information a second much less 20 petaflops , your Brain would overheat.

that is just an estimate of the calculation power of the human brain. of course it is never running at full capacity. a pc rarely runs at full capacity like that... and when it does, you have an awful lot of trouble multi-tasking or even just running that one overpowering program.

Originally posted by lost_shaman

Originally posted by beyondSciFi

Er I think your math is off... 100 billion x 1,000 x 200 = 20,000,000 billion calculations per sec or 20 petaflops not 100 teraflops. SO... there wont be any computer to outdo the human brain FLOPS wise for 20-40 years... But remember computers are good at just crunching number, just deciding to pick up a pen is more complex for your brain then for a computer to find 379 to the 51th power. (Just an example)

But you must also consider that no ones Brain is processing 100 teraflops of information a second much less 20 petaflops , your Brain would overheat.

True, I never said that the brain was working at 100% capacity, but if it was, no machine on earth today would match it...

BTW to give you a comparision... a Pentium 4 at 2ghz does around 2.6 gigaflops, at 3ghz it does around 4 gigaflops, and the worlds best single core CPU (FX-57) does around 5.8 gigaflops. (from SiSoftware Sandra)

So those supercomputers (200+ teraflops) really are super when compared with the average home CPU.

[edit on 31-10-2005 by beyondSciFi]

im going to have to agree with ShadowXIX

peace
jeff

p.s. deny hate

Originally posted by beyondSciFi

Er I think your math is off... 100 billion x 1,000 x 200 = 20,000,000 billion calculations per sec or 20 petaflops not 100 teraflops.

[edit on 31-10-2005 by beyondSciFi]

Its not my math its according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

www.wired.com...

Originally posted by ShadowXIX
Its not my math its according to Hans Morvec, principal research scientist at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University.

www.wired.com...

My bad forgot to read your link. Er ok so how did a professor no less, mess up on his math... or is there something that wasn't stated in the article that would make my deduction incorrect?

Maybe he was factoring in the amount of calculations per seond the human brain at any given single peroid of time could make. We use all of our brain but never the whole 100% percent at one time. Perhaps the number you came up with was if it was running at 100% at one time.

Either that or the article messed up the numbers

[edit on 31-10-2005 by ShadowXIX]

Originally posted by ShadowXIX
Maybe he was factoring in the amount of calculations per seond the human brain at any given single peroid of time could make. We use all of our brain but never the whole 100% percent at one time. Perhaps the number you came up with was if it was running at 100% at one time.

Either that or the article messed up the numbers

[edit on 31-10-2005 by ShadowXIX]

yes
the number (20 million billion) is an estimate of the human brain's computing power at full capacity, since it would require all 100 billion neurons firing on all 1000 connections a piece, 200 times a second.
that would equate to 100% workload.

edit: its just like when you by a pc and it is advertised as running at so many gHz, that is the power of the pc running at full capacity.

[edit on 10/31/2005 by McGuirk]

Will a computer ever be aas smart as me?



That's pretty stupid.

Computers can already do the math better than me, but once it has the number, it has no idea what to do with it. I do.

Computers are alreeady at the level of some people here, but not me.

Crunch that! Sheesh.

I'm going to hold off expectations till I see bio-engineered computers running on trinary. Maybe then.

Check out what MIT has been researching.

Originally posted by Thomas Crowne
Will a computer ever be aas smart as me?

That's pretty stupid....

im sorry but this post comes off to me as ignorant.. by what are you considering "smart"? As far as pure knowledge goes, a computer can and will be smarter... it has far more potential to retain knowledge and process it faster. now if you're considering smart as being able to grasp abstract ideas, then you are more than likely correct.

Originally posted by McGuirk

now if you're considering smart as being able to grasp abstract ideas, then you are more than likely correct.

I think it may take some time for this to really happen , but not 40 years.

Like Human Intelligence the AI will learn more faster the more it learns.

How long will it take before AI is able to integrate new information and learned behaviors with Abstract ideas , or able to form ideas and opinions based on its own learned knowledge?

Who knows but I think it will be sooner rather than later.

my point was that i dont think it will be able to grasp ideas such as these since they are directly correlated to the uniquely human ideas of morality, integrity, and other such intangible ideas. these are things that come from your "soul".

on that note, im going to bed for the night ill check in the morning for new posts

First of all. Comparing the human brain with any currently existing computer system is like comparing apples with a stone brick.

I'm deliberatly not saying apples and oranges because apples and oranges are at least still both fruits and organics.

Then, as far as you CAN compare them, you guys are counting utterly and totaly wrong.

The peak performance measured on super computers is actualy measured. Its a number that shows the system in action optimaly using all its hardware, software and highest potential of its busses and networks to come up with a true capacity performance number.

You guys are trying to compare what the human brain can do by adding up the performance all the brains cells can do individualy.

Super computers individual processors potential all added up, can do more then what they do when working in unison trough their infrastructure.

Bluegene\L has 65536 CPU's doing 280.6 Tflops or rougly 4 Gflops per CPU.

As stated before me in this thread, there are even quite a few mainstream CPU's that are doing above 4Gflops. Especialy now with the multicored Athlon FX's.

If you make a real comparison and look at what the human brain can do while its doing the things it always does and quite frankly needs to do or you'd be dead, with supercomputers capacity (which is rather accuratly measured by these Top500.org tflops measurements). Then you'll see that supercomputer systems have surpassed the human brain in raw processing power by at least a factor of 5.

The human brain always uses parts of itself to operate your body, process audio input, visual inputs, sencory inputs, memory, your contiousness and quite a bit more, this could compare to supercomputers always using parts of itself to operate its infrastructure and interconnections(which takes away quite a bit of its full potential), process sencory inputs to prevent data colisions and organize data structures internaly for optimal performance , operate its storage system, run its operating system and so on.

Supercomputers are way more efficient then the human brain in doing mathematical calculations, mainly because thats what computers are based on and built for, mathematical calculations and algoritems. If a supercomputer would have to process the same things the human brain does, it would need to emulate these functions trough math.

Divide your math result for total possible nr of calculations per second by 1000 and you will be close to the truth. The connections do not calculate, they only carry info. A neural net doesn't operate like that anyway. The calculations made assume a sequential calculator, which a neural net is not.

[edit on 1-11-2005 by Astronomer68]

Then you'll see that supercomputer systems have surpassed the human brain in raw processing power by at least a factor of 5.

Where did you get this arbitrary number? Make it up?

I agree with thematrix that you really can't compare the human brain to a binary computer system. They are far too dissimilar. However, I do believe a day will come when there will be artificial intelligence, and it won't be that far off. Computers will evolve as well as software. I read somewhere in MIT magazine, I believe, where an experiment was ran on a computer to design electronic circuits. They built an array of FPGA's and wrote software to try different circuits through trial and error. The assignment was to digitally recreate a sound received from a microphone, and the program went through over 1,000 trials in a matter of minutes to find the optimal circuit. When designers traced out the circuit, they could not figure out how it worked.

My point is very soon we will see computers designing computers, and the evolution will increase even more drastic. I don't think it will take 40 years to obtain artificial intelligence, and it will surpass our own. But even then it will be a tool we use to make our lives easier, the same as today.

Mc, I was shooting for that exact thing; thanks for pointing it out. I c an only count on new folks to do that as folks who've been posting for any length of time have picked up on my lousy sense of humor and ignore it.

Also, thanks for repackaging what I said and saying it again. But, of course, a computer that has been programmed to be a thesaurus could have done that.