Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Dr. Melon]

You should totally become a fighting monk. By applying physical pain to people, you lessen their emotional pain and the pain of their existance.

[alway]

A question, will you still be able to play DF?

He will be able to play the entire time. In his mind. 

[MaximumZero]

I wonder what kind of specs the human brain would have as a computer...

[PTTG??]

Every neuron is a separate processor, memory unit, and NIC, so that's about a hundred billion cores right there, plus, since neurons are pretty capable computers on their own, each one powerful enough to do simple image recognition, that's got to be at least a couple Kb of RAM- let's say 5 Kb- each, so that's 49.5 terabytes of RAM.
 
Then there's the 1000 trillion synapses, which might very well be thought of as long-term storage, or HDD storage. I'm not sure how to measure that in terms of storage, but it's probably at least a few hundred terabytes taken together. After all, a human can not only remember hundreds of digits of PI, with no special encryption, but can also remember the chemical composition (smell/taste) of virtually every food they encounter, 3-D maps of every place they've ever been (although occasionally this can get corrupted), and a database of the majority of the words in possibly several languages, including levels of detail and inflection that have never been properly studied.
 
So that's at least a few thousand Terabytes, probably.

[MaximumZero]

So, we're talking what, a few hundred thousand FPS?

[PTTG??]

Well, we're talking about Dwarf Fortress here, so it's probably going to be about a thousand FPS max.
 
And it's got some stability problems. Some of them even have severe task-management issues. You want to run DF on it, all it wants to do is eat or something.

[G-Flex]

Every neuron is a separate processor, memory unit, and NIC, so that's about a hundred billion cores right there, plus, since neurons are pretty capable computers on their own, each one powerful enough to do simple image recognition, that's got to be at least a couple Kb of RAM- let's say 5 Kb- each, so that's 49.5 terabytes of RAM.
 
Then there's the 1000 trillion synapses, which might very well be thought of as long-term storage, or HDD storage. I'm not sure how to measure that in terms of storage, but it's probably at least a few hundred terabytes taken together. After all, a human can not only remember hundreds of digits of PI, with no special encryption, but can also remember the chemical composition (smell/taste) of virtually every food they encounter, 3-D maps of every place they've ever been (although occasionally this can get corrupted), and a database of the majority of the words in possibly several languages, including levels of detail and inflection that have never been properly studied.
 
So that's at least a few thousand Terabytes, probably.

You've got to be kidding me. That's probably the most naive explanation of anything neurological I've ever heard.

[MaximumZero]

Care to expand on that? I'd like your side of the story. How would the average Bay12er brain work as a computer, as according to G-Flex?

[G-Flex]

It wouldn't, because brains don't work like computers we know. Most analogies wind up being naive.

Another thing about memory in the brain is that it's cross-linked like crazy. Things refer to other things. In other words, remembering what an apple and a pear are like does not take up double whatever-the-hell storage the brain uses than simply remembering what an apple is like, because those shared traits probably aren't exactly getting stored anew for every single thing that has them.


I have no idea what he means by "no special encryption"; why the hell would the brain "encrypt" data? Is there some kind of security risk involved? Does it have a firewall too? I want to say he means "encoding", in which case he's wrong: As I said, most of the stuff you remember is just other stuff you remember but arranged differently. That's why mnemonic devices work so well; it's easier to commit data to memory successfully if you relate it to other things rather than having it floating around as a mostly-orphaned chunk that's prone to error.


Describing neurons as having a "processor, memory unit, and NIC" is extremely misleading and... weird. You might as well say that my microwave has a NIC in it because it receives and outputs data. He's using very sensationalistic terms here in order to make things sound impressive. A single neuron is not comparable to a CPU core.

I'm confused about "simple image recognition", as well. A single neuron? How so?



I'm not saying that the human brain isn't impressive, just that comparisons to modern consumer electronics are necessarily going to be misleading and have to be taken with a grain of salt, since the human brain works on very, very, very different principles.

[PTTG??]

Don't worry, G-flex. I am kidding you.
 

...How would the average Bay12er brain work as a computer?...

Oh, well you say an average B12er... The answer to that question is: They don't work at all.
 
Although I feel that I need to defend my statement about Pi encryption. I meant that those people who memorise lots of Pi can't even take advantage of run-length encoding due to the nature of the number. Theey need to remember each digit individually.
 
And the thing about image recognition. I recall an experiment wherin individual rat neurons could recognise and respond differently to different human faces.
 
But let me be clear, I wasn't talking about a functional level, which I know fully well is very different. I was answering Maximum Zero's post by describing a generic human brain in computer terms. Relax buddy.

[G-Flex]

Although I feel that I need to defend my statement about Pi encryption. I meant that those people who memorise lots of Pi can't even take advantage of run-length encoding due to the nature of the number. Theey need to remember each digit individually.

This is still false. People who do things like that use mnemonic devices and techniques to make it easier, include Guiness record-holder types.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piphilology

That's an entire article about mnemonic devices used to remember the digits of pi.

But let me be clear, I wasn't talking about a functional level, which I know fully well is very different. I was answering Maximum Zero's post by describing a generic human brain in computer terms. Relax buddy.

Sure, but it's still misleading because the analogy is still so far off-base that it's just... not worth a whole lot to begin with. It's not just misleading in the sense that the internal systems don't work the same (and of course you didn't intend to say otherwise), but also that the results aren't the same; the effects, usefulness, reliability, etc. of computer memory and human thought and memory differ quite drastically. It's not just the implementation that's different, because they aren't implementing the same things.

[PTTG??]

Allow me to put that more simply:
 

IT WAS A JOKE.

[G-Flex]

I tend to assume that sentences starting with "Although I feel that I need to defend my statement [...]" aren't part of the joke anymore.

[MaximumZero]

I was being a smartass as well. So, back to the rails?

[Armok]

The brain has billions of neurons.
Each operate at 200hz. (compare with modern computers at Ghz)
DF is single threaded.