X-Message-Number: 15335 Date: Sun, 14 Jan 2001 11:27:48 -0700 From: Mike Perry <> Subject: Reply to Thomas Donaldson Thomas Donaldson, #15328, says: >First of all, I would consider the THEORETICAL possibility of imitating >a brain with a single computer to be quite useless unless we could >somehow make it a real possibility. Good. I have asked the question before of whether you are only interested in practical ways of imitating a brain. It appears the answer is yes, and if so, I don't see much basis for disagreement between our views, assuming a few other difficulties like the below are resolved, and except insofar as I am also interested in theoretical quesions too. ... >Second, the comments about polynomial growth are wrong. ... > the exponentiality comes not from the creation of new neurons, >but from the number of connections which they allow. ... >Given a set of N neurons, the number of connections between them goes >up like N!. Here's where I need some clarification. If we have N neurons, it seems to me that at most we could have every one connected to every other one, and we could distinguish between a connection going from neuron A to neuron B vs. B to A. I.e. we would have a complete, directed graph on N vertices. In that case the number of connections is just N*(N-1) (or N^2 if you allow a neuron to connect to itself), not N!. It's possible that one "connection" could involve more than one connector; if that is the case then I suppose any number of connections could occur between even 2 neurons, let alone N, but then it seems that a similar effect could be achieved by varying connection strengths using only one connector. Again, some clarification is needed. Mike Perry Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=15335