Is the Human Brain the Fastest Cpu

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She was one killer hottie when she put her mind to it and backed away from the donuts.
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That's the truth. But she had way too many problems in life, and like a lot women, had to struggle with the donuts, chocolate, and other such stuff. Life can be bad at times, though, and I know that a chocolate whatever can look mighty tasty when the roof falls in.

She had ballooned out to blimp status, but I really respected her for dropping it all and getting her sizzling figure back. Considering she was pushing 40 she was HOT!

Hmmm... how are we possibly gonna get this thread back to brains and CPUs? :?
 
This is just an example of brains vs cpus...we're completely off topic discussing hotness (yeah!) whereas a cpu would be flashing its cursor waiting for orders right now(boo!).
I'd say brains (or at least brains under the influence of hormones) 1 cpu 0
 
I think the fact we only use about 20% of our brain anyway says alot too. Imagine unlocking the whole thing.....
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That's a very misleading statement. I have heard/read several variations on this "statistic" with different sources giving the percentage used from 3-33%. The key thing to remember is that anything that we don't use in our body atrophies; this includes brain tissue. In fact, scientists doing research on the brains of feral children noticed that the language area of the brain does not develop; obviously because feral children do not use language while feral. They have shown that feral children who have been "rescued" after a certain age will never have the same command of language as their year-mates. It seems that the language area of the brain requires use for it to develop.

Also, if we only use 20% of our brains; why does nature bother with growing the other 80%? If it is not used, it has no survival advantage; on the contrary it is a survival liability. We use all that energy and resources to create an organ and then send a third of our blood supply to maintain it; then turn around and use only 20% of it? I don't think so. Natural selection would have favored those who did not waste so much resources on an organ that they end up using so sparingly.

Rather recent research suggests that the statement should read: We only use <<i>insert your favorite percentage</i>> of our brain <i><b>at a given moment</b></i>. So we actually use all of our brains, but never all at once. This actually is a good thing because if someone were to use 100% of his brain at the same time, his brain would overload and it would appear that he was having a seizure. Just imagine if your PC was sending all possible signals through all of its circuits (motherboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, etc) at the same time; I don't think that would be a pretty picture.
 
How fast can you calculate Pi to the 1millionth digit? You can't? Well, pretty damn slow comparted to a computer then.


The human brain is the fastest storage medium and fastest input device by far. You can't calculate Pi to 1m digits in you head, but you could memorize it. You can "record" HD video in your head at hundreds of gigabytes per second. Computers can't touch that.

Sure, robots and AI are clumsy right now, but it would take a team of ~100 engineers working 5 hours a day 7 days a week for 10 years to equal the amount of time that goes into "programming" a 40yo person. It's the software and storage devices on computers that are slow, the computational power is many orders of magnitude greater.

There are rudementary self-learning computer programs already operating. Working together as teams thinking analytically human beings are inherrantly capable of designing systems that operate better than us. This is what any invention is (well, any good invention at least). We design systems, tools, that are better at a task then we are, computers are no different. We're struggling with creating computer systems that are all-around smarter than us because we are stupid, reletively speaking, and highly prone to error. Human being come with a lot of "software" pre-written. Once we fully understand this base platform implementing, i think, on computers will be a snap and from there with increased computational power, near error-free operation, and the ability to upgrade both hardware and software such a system should be able to design self-improvements that take it well beyond human capabilities.

@xaat_kil

Emotions and desires are merely chemical reactions. Pure math baby.

@Onthefarside

That whole "humans only use 10% of their brain" thing is an urban myth with no science to back it up.

@RamboMadCow

No, they can't. You are simply wrong. What they CAN do is access very large databases quickly to find the correct matching algorithm so solve the problem quickly. That "training" is software, not hardware. Once you write the correct software (ie. superpi) a CPU so much faster there is no comparison. Are you seriously suggesting there are human beings who can calculate Pi to the 1millionth digit in <10seconds even if we assumed they had some way they could prove it? That's perposterous. No one can even recite >100000 digits of Pi using memorization much less calculate it in their head.

@sweetpants

Say that again and think about it. You have it completely backwards. How long does it take to load a level in a game? How long does it take you to remember what the level is like? How long does it take to calculate the physics of you driving your scorpion off a cliff? How long does it take you to calculate it? You CAN'T, but you can remember what it was like and do it again exactly the same way. Most things that appear to be human calculation power that a computer can't match are actually just trial and error combined with memorization and fast data fetching. Baseball players don't calculate how to hit a home run every time they step up to the plate, they've memorized it. It's like pre-rendered graphics vs. real-time graphics. Or brain is slow so we pre-render almost everything.

@skittle
This is a good point, but computers CAN do hueristics, and I would argue that it is the SOFTWARE and databases that are lacking, not the hardware. If you were to suppose that it would be impossible to design a self-learning AI that could rival a human intelligence you would be right. It would be rather difficult to prove that such a task is impossible though especially considering rudementary self-learning softare has already been written.

@DaSickNinja
"Is it aware?" A CPU isn't aware of itself, but neither are individual parts of my brain. Even a simple program like SpeedFan demonstrates how software can be self-aware of itself and "feel" it's hardware and take action based on conditions. That's all self-awareness is. That's hardly a benchmark for intelligence. "Can it exist?" Humans are just as easy to "unplug" as computers, it's just not as easy to plug them back in xD

@Elbert
Rendering graphics for output is a good example of something that a computer seems to do slowly, but I must point out human beings can't do it at all. There is no "video out" on the human brain and we don't really "render" graphics when we "record" them either, we just memorize them. You can imagine graphics though... that's difficult to quantify but it could be considered the human brain creating and rendering HD video content which would be equivalent to say, re-encoding a an HD video but I think the human brain cheats and uses a lot of pre-rendered stuff, much like the nVidia drivers that were optomized for 3DMark. But impressive none the less *ponders*, you might have brought up the best point I've seen so far (feeling, learning, walking, decision making and math savants really aren't beyond the capabilities of current computer hardware) but very hard to quantify.

I must now go ponder this...
 
. The big key is that a human can always beat a computer in calculation speed by just unplugging the PC.
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LOL, well said.

I think the one key that makes the mortal brain more powerful is Rationalization.

I think the fact we only use about 20% of our brain anyway says alot too. Imagine unlocking the whole thing.....

Last I heard we actively use 12% of our brains. The other 88% is constantly being used for muscle control. Heart rate, breathing cycles, blinking, etc., are constantly being done. Even when we sleep our biological hard drives get defragmented and our brain gets optimized through rapid eye movement cycles.


The fastest CPU in the world is in essence a really complicated abacus. Core 2 Quads and QuadFX's? Multi - leveled abacus's. Our brain is not even comparable to these things in the complexity and sheer vastness of power that it contains. Your CPU might be able to calculate the square root of pi to the millionth place, but can it feel? Can it exist? Is it aware? And by all these things I don't mean a hollow emulation of human emotions and philosophies but the actual capacity to think.
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I HATE the abacus comparison. The abacus is more like RAM. >10 friggin bytes of RAM.




On topic, I've been writing since I got here about when brain equivalent CPUs would be coming to market. Runs in the hertz range, but with an IPC that's in the millions. Lots of cores/threads in a heterogeneous mixture. Kind of like what AMD's Fusion is supposed to be doing. 20 cores, some for this, some for that, and thirteen other things going at the same time on the same chip.
 
I've read that the brain also functions as a heat regulator, shedding something like 75% of our excess heat. That can account for much of its bulk as well.
I'm not totally convinced that brain size matters much, as some species of spider operate 8 legs, 6 eyes, 5 spinerettes, and react to fear, as well as curiosity, yet have virtually no appreciable brain.
 
don't think of it in terms of processing power yet, first you must think of just perception alone. with the most advanced technology on the planet you can not create the incredible level of information our bodys can take in from the environment, through our incredible eyesight, pitch perfect hearing or infinitly complex nervous system under our skin. thats just letting us know where we are. now think of the many thousands of systems that need maintaining in the body, water levels, body temp, hormone control, blood flow, glucose access, waste filtering, cell production... could go on forever. all very demanding stuff to a computer. AFTER ALL THAT you STILL have our conscience being to take into mind (so to speak) and the way we think, remember and feel.

We're miles ahead baby!
 
Rendering graphics for output is a good example of something that a computer seems to do slowly, but I must point out human beings can't do it at all. There is no "video out" on the human brain and we don't really "render" graphics
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Actually, humans are very good at rendering graphics. A good speech, song, or poem paints very vivid images that can inspire, explain or convey much more information than the number of words inherently contain themselves. I have friends that can say more with a simple shrug of their shoulders than can be conveyed in a paragraph of words.
 
Well, the brain in essence is completely different to a CPU. A brain doesn't have a clock frequency, and is more like a vast, ultra-compressed neural network in which each neuron acts like a small processing unit with upto 10,000 connections to other neurons. I mean, compare that to a dual-core CPU, in which each core has only one interconnect between each other. The brain works under different principals, especially how it deals with information, and can take a lot of data, process and organise it so it is either stored or used as our 'perception' or awareness of the world. A brain is self-aware, a CPU isn't, and overall, the brain is an incredible thing. To build a CPU like a brain means you'll have to scrap all the traditional methods and concepts and would require you to create something that is completely hardware-based, can adapt to a changing environment, and handle data in the same way a brain does. There's already a computer built this way, but all it can do is process retinal data at 96 x 60 resolution in the same way the brain does. Not very complex and impressive when compared to the human brain, but when compared to CPUs, its quite amazing.
 
Everything we design is of intelligent design. As for our brains they are a product of billions of years of evolution.

In other words we are here because of a series of random events and evolution. If we created a robot to be human it would never be the same as a human because it would have the constraints of intelligent design where nature has no contraints and can create life from virtually nothing.

A computer or cpu will always be bound to our experiences or what the designer programs it to do, but if we can create a cpu that can interact with nature then it can create its own experiences that will allow it to truly evolve and become more than what we could ever make it ourselves. :wink:
 
I did a small research paper on technology and a speech on processing power; technically, to equate the CPU to a brain, the brain IS faster.

Link: http://www.transhumanist.com/volume1/moravec.htm
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For graphical interpretation only according to that article. It even says that a computer system estimated to be 1/30th of the power of a person for graphical interpretation is much much faster for many kinds of mathematical problems.

This really brings forth a deepening to the question as to what kind of tasks are under consideration. Kind of silly that we didn't think of it right of the bat. We are all well familiar with different kinds of processing units having strenths and weaknesses. For example: Cyrix 3 vs. Pentium for a few specific tasks or a GPU vs. a CPU for floating point.

Human vs. computer for calculating Pi and doing physics simulations: Computer by a long shot

Human vs. Computer for finding a child in a croud or recognizing language: Human by a long shot

But is this really a result of superior computational power or does the human brain "cheat"? Does the human brain have highly refined A/V intepretation hardware or does our computer software just suck? For some tasks somputers aren't just a little bit faster and more accurate, they are billions of times faster and more accurate, so why the huge reversal of roles when we move into AV manipulation?

Are you thining what I'm thinking? Cybernetics, oh yeah. If stem cells could be used to double GFX card performance no sane person would dare outlaw it for fear of being taken over by legions of enemy robots :)
 
Last I heard we actively use 12% of our brains. The other 88% is constantly being used for muscle control. Heart rate, breathing cycles, blinking, etc., are constantly being done. Even when we sleep our biological hard drives get defragmented and our brain gets optimized through rapid eye movement cycles.
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i like this statement mainly cause i always remember how and why we dream, dreams are memories that the brain is defragmenting, our dreams dont correspond exactly yo real life, instead they are made up of different memories, as the memories are defragged they blend into one hence creating a dream that sometimes doesnt make sense.

as for deja vu, i believe this is down with the statement if you can see every partical in the universe, see where it has been and the direction it is heading you can accuratly predict the future, dreams could draw on past experiences it is only natuaral that they sometimes correspond to something that may happen in the future hence deja vu.

as for the OP i believe that the brain is more powerfull in the sense that my CPU can only do one thing at a time(well 2 cause its dual core) but none the less it just does things so fast it looks like its doing more, whereas my brain can let me breath, type, and think all at the same time(without stopping one to do the other)

yet the brain is less powerfull when it comes to performing calculations that require large amounts of thought.

btw, what happend to that theory that theres a part of our brain in the left lobe that scientists think we used to use for reading minds? we no longer use it now cause there is no need(probably caused by the development of language) i could quite possibly see the fact that we only use a certain amount of our brain all the time, when you take into consideration the amount of time it takes for evolution, the brain is still evolving, it just hasnt got round to getting rid of the parts we no longer need but used to use.

P.S

at the basic level the brain is no different from a CPU, the brain recieves electrical signals, the CPU recieves electrical signals, thats all there is too it really. i dont think we really do percieve things perception is just something we do to justify our existance. same way "time" doesnt exist its just there to make our lives more convienient.
 
Which is faster, a top end CPU cluster, or a human brain. That answer is simple. The human brain. Proof:

The NP class of problems. Problems which though are solvable, all known algorithims for solving them take so long that they are considered unsolvable. Things like....creating routing tables. These sorts of problems tend to be very simple for a human being to do, the problem is the solution is constantly changing and it isn't practical to have a person watch over it constantly.

My personal favorite NP class problem is a logic puzzle. Now, as it's a logic puzzle, it would make sense that a logic processor such as a CPU could solve it, but it can't. It's of the subclass NP-incomplete. This logic puzzles is called minesweeper. Logically, it's solvable. This is proven in that I have a best time of 77 seconds on expert, but computationally, it's impossible. You cannot write an algorithim to solve minesweeper, though I am able to solve it fairly regularly.

Other proof, FFTs. In the amount of time it takes for a computer to process a rather small and insignificant data set, I have processed several hundred of them, with much larger data sets, analyzed them and reacted to them. I call these reactions the acts of listening and seeing. I'm also fairly good when it comes to kinematics, though as this stuff is fairly basic, computers can almost keep up with me.

And as for AI, anybody who says that within our lifetime AI will be a reality, you should read up on AI. All AIs are nothing more then seeing how fast you can traverse a tree. Self learning AIs simply hit the end of their tree, add a new branch of what not to do, and if it can finally figure out by process of elimination what it should do, then it adds that branch. Personally I can usually figure out what to do without trying everything that I shouldn't do first.
 
I believe it is absurd to ask this question without more precise definitions of terms.

In standard conversation we assess the speed of a CPU by its ability to do floating-point operations and other things of this nature. If we put brains in the same classification as CPUs (as the tagline of the thread implies) then obviously a synthetic CPU is going to beat humans out.

But this is really a gross equivocation. CPUs are not of the same class as brains, at least not for the purpose of this conversation. Consider the properties of the brain that the CPU does not share: sensory inputs, dissonance (this is a big one), and some would argue, a certain something-ness of the conscience. These are obviously dimensions across which brains cannot be compared to CPUs.

To answer the question, therefore, we can only really compare the like properties between the two things. Obviously crunching numbers is the property refered to here. And yes, a CPU is "faster" in the sense that it crunches several decimal places faster, but then when we restrict the conversation to this fact, the question suddenly becomes boring.
 
The A.I. itself will be the end product, designed in a programing language(Meta Language), not specifically the hardware. But hardware that mimics the human brain structure will probably play a significant part in A.I. conciousness!

Personally i beleive any robots or computers that are BILLED as A.I. in the next 50 years will be just a program that mimics (has prescribed responces) human thought or behavior pattens.

Are we talking Brain vs CPU or are we talking Human vs Robot/Computer
because the cpu is a specialised piece of hardware, but the BIOS is also an intergral part of a computer?

How about we try asking a computer how it feels, that i would assume is a more complex equation then the way computers are tested now through numerical ability. (Also there are some humans that have a great capacity to calculate dificult numerical equations in there heads quicker then computers(maybe/not sure if its quicker))but they can't output it as quickly as a computer
 
You must remember that computers (CPU's) are ignorant. They are not smart, they do what they are told to do. Without the human brain the CPU would no exist. The human brain is superior, but the CPU can help to complete specific tasks that the Human brain designed it to much faster and more efficient because of the power from the human brain that was put into it.

Best,

3Ball
 
Only problem with the brain is that it can't think outside of its experiences, at least not without a lot of effort. Like try yourself, to imagine 10 dimensional space, etc. Yuo might think of something strange but i don't think you could really grasp the feeling without experiencing it.
 
I think the fact we only use about 20% of our brain anyway says allot too. Imagine unlocking the whole thing.....
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No, you use 100% of your brain 100% of the time. Any neurons not in use die. Any neurons created die if they aren’t in use. If you lose a billion neuron you will need to exercise your brain to keep the new neurons you create. Einstein for instance, had so many neurons he actually had extra nodes of extremely dense neural pathways. I want to stress this fact because it’s a widespread misinformation that we only use 10% of our brains, this go against ever piece of nature in existence. If we only used 10% of our brain than it would 1/10 the size it is!

The human brain, as someone already said, is able to remember the answer once it’s been provided; at that point, we are faster. Access to memory is nearly instant, if the memory is "fresh". As time goes by, our "clock" determines what needs to be kept in the temporal cortex, in either case; we can always create a solution. A computer, is given a problem with a method to solve it, the brain can work from an answer, conjecturize, theorize, and solve any question. Think of it this way, a CPU isn’t doing anything creative, it is just plotting data, the answer, question, or means of answering the question are already provided, so it’s really just doing the pencil work for you.

Every time neurons are made, most of them die; the ones that are stimulated are added to the structural network. If you want to exercise the brain do things throughout the day differently than usual. Brush your teeth with your left hand, wash your face before your hair, put your socks on first...Each time you do something differently you put to use new neurons that would otherwise be disposed of naturally. The brain gets so efficient that actions done day in day out have neural highways to complete these tasks, once these are made, they only require a small amount of replacement neurons. This is how doing day to day activities differently can increase your brain activity. Instead of using the highway, a new path is made; sending a ripple effect of impulses across the entire brain, when the right part of the brain receives the signal the action or thought is created. The brain eventually says "HEY, you do this all the time, I’m gonna make a special road to do this task for ya, aight!" and thus, you can do this task with basically no "effort" at all, it’s done faster than other areas that observe where you are at what time (ever wonder how you got in the shower?).

If you don't want to read the above. Just remember that you always use 100% of your brain. Though your 100% is going to differ from other people.
 
I wouldn't exactly call the brain a heat regulator; it does perform this function, but only in some circumstances. As I have mentioned in my first post, our brains receive around one third of our blood supply; so it can cool or heat the rest of the body depending on the ambient temperature. So if the weather is cold and you don't wear a hat, you radiate up to 33% of your body heat into the air; conversely, if it's hot out and you don't wear a hat (not a winter one of course) you are at a much greater risk of sunstroke.

As for brain size, once you pass a certain size it ceases to be a determining factor in the intelligence of an organism. Humans have a wide range of brain sizes, but it is the complexity of the brain that determines intelligence: i.e. the structure of the brain and the number of axon connections. Size still matters as we realize that a brain half the size of a human's could never be as complex. So the size difference of two brains must be fairly large for brain size to affect intelligence.

**NOTE** When discussing brain size above, I am really talking about the ratio of the brain size to body size; we obviously are aware that while an elephant's brain is several times larger than ours, we possess more intelligence due to a more favorable brain to body size ratio. As it has been pointed out already, the bigger the body the bigger the brain must be to control it.
 
outstanding 4 pages of text since i started this thread a few hours ago

regarding terms i intentionally left this open ended for the debate that has occurred to take place

a point was raised about balance and here i beleive lies the true power of the brain. imagine a footballer (soccer) running weaving in and out of opposition whilst controlling a ball with his feet, the number of physics equations going on every milisecond is Massive in order to keep him balanced esspecially as he sidesteps and chooses which way to turn in order get past the 3 players his brain processes as an image, these physics calculations are accurate varying upon the individual but i woudl suggest that no supercomputer would be able to perform the physics calculations involved in the action above in the time that they are required.



do humans Render
Yes they do!
the eye does not see!
it merely converts light into electrical impulses that are rendered by the brain into the display inside our head.which is the process we attribute to sight. what resolution do we see at? the eye does not produce the image.

the hardest calculation currently known is the calculation of fluid dynamics is there an example of where the brain calulates this i cant think of any off hand
 
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