[extropy-chat] Moore != AI (was: Taiwan)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Mar 31, 2005 at 02:57:03PM +0100, Dirk Bruere wrote:

> Well, we are already at 10^14 FLOPS and at a guess a FLOP takes more 

Is it affordable? Is peak flops a meaningful measure for neuronal code?

> processing than a dendrite/axon. By 2015 we may well be up to 10^17 

You're guessing. You're wrong. All practical packages burn up OPS like
there's no tomorrow.

Getting an O(1) scaling with problem sized (if matched by hardware) is in
theory easy (spatial tesselation CA over a 3d torus of nodes is an example),
but no such practical codes for AI exist. Not yet.

Software engineering doesn't follow Moore, you'll observe.

> FLOPS in top of the range supercomputers.
> Neural sim does assume specialist h/w though.
> With such simulating 10^10 neurons each with 10^4 axons doesn't seem all 
> that difficult from a computational POV.
> 
> >Even if we knew, how to extract the relevant information (we don't), and 
> >had
> >a system able to simulate the relevant aspects (we don't).
> >
> > 
> >
> I'm a bit more optimistic than that.

Do you have a rational reason for optimism?  Morphogenetic part of genetic
networks is currently a complete unknown. Scanning is currently limited to
TEM -- properties of the shape are complete guesswork. Some simple systems
are solved, a generic wet neuro simulator is quite beyond the state of the
art.

Have you seen how e.g. Neuron scales?

> I would be suprised if more than 10% of the brain was actually involved 
> in interesting stuff, such as consciousness.

I don't know what consciousness is. I do know that you don't know how to tell
which aspects of the scanned system are relevant, and which are omissible.

Not trying to put you down; nobody else does. Yet.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a>
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