X-Message-Number: 15918
Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2001 08:46:25 -0800
From: Kennita Watson <>
Subject: Computer AI

Thomas Donaldson wrote:
> Finally, some time ago I raised problems about Turing machines as
> models for us. One major problem was that of timing, since we are
> highly parallel brains. Two people came back and said that this
> did not declare Turing's ideas to be worthless. I should explain
> myself here on this point: sorry, but it does cause problems. If
> you want to accept a theory which suggests that in billiions of
> years we can imitate the thinking of a human being neuron by neuron
> for a perioid of 10 minutes, then go ahead and accept it. But in
> practice the time it takes for computation will become MAJOR,
> and anyone who wants to explain how human beings work "as computers"
> needs to take that time into account. Moreover even imitation
> needs some serious thought: our neurons are not all working
> simultaneously in simultaneous steps. This makes even the theoretical
> modelling of a brain with a single computer a hard problem: different
> neurons will send out messages sometimes virtually simultaneously,
> and affect others simultaneously too. It's not obvious how to
> model such events with a single computer, even if you forget
> how long the calculations would take.
> 
I'm not sure if this has been covered, but for those new to the
discussion:  none of this means that computer intelligence won't 
work.  We are making computers smaller and smaller and faster 
and faster (there's even been a start made on molecular
computing), and we already know how to network computers so they
can cooperate on solving problems in parallel (cf. the Internet).  

The number of neurons in a brain is finite, and the number of 
connections between them is finite, and chemical communication is
actually slower than electronic communication, so I think a trillion
networked Turing-equivalent molecular computers could do *much*
better than a billion years per 10 minutes.  It's a Simple Matter
of Programming :-) .
-- 
Live long and prosper,
Kennita
--
Kennita Watson          |  I vote Libertarian.
     |      Find out why.
http://www.kennita.com  |           http://www.lp.org/intro

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