| tim Josling 2008-01-12, 6:56 pm |
| On Sat, 12 Jan 2008 10:01:22 -0500, Charles Hottel wrote:
> Besides learnig more about intelligence we may also learn more about
> parallel processes and how they can communicate and be synchronized. As
> Howard alluded to via "voting mechanism" the brain seem to have many
> parallel processes and also seems to pre-compute and store patterns instead
> of computing them from scratch all the time. The actual processing speed of
> the neurons seems quite slow compared to computer circuits.
Individual neurons are slow, with a cycle time of about 20ms. That's maybe
a million times slower than silicon. But there are a phenomenal number of
neurons, and each neuron has on average 1,000 active links to other
neurons where processing of some kind occurs.
The implication of this, as you point out, is that there must be a huge
amount of parallel processing going on.
Give me 100 trillion active processing units, even if slow, and with the
right algorithms I can do great things.
Graphics cards currently employ a high amount of parallelism. Individual
units are a lot slower than modern CPUs. But for the right problem they
are far faster than a standard CPU.
Tim Josling
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