[extropy-chat] Not necessary smarter, just faster?

[Samantha Atkins]

These points seem to be missing something.  A human level brain  
running at, say, 140 IQ but a million times faster can accomplish 1  
million man years of work per year and do so without the tremendous  
management hassles and interpersonal friction of running a million  
person team.  That is huge.  Many problems are quite tractable to a  
large scale effort of that kind.

It also seems  very likely that the neocortex would optimize many  
problems faster and more fully when run at vastly higher speeds with  
equivalently speeded up inputs.  Such a brain would be smarter over  
time and in much shorter time than otherwise.

There were no unique neural structures found in Einstein's brain AFAIK.

- samantha

On May 11, 2006, at 3:54 AM, Robert Bradbury wrote:

>
> On 5/11/06, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> You can compensate a lot by hard work. Up to a point. Vide supra:  
> the eternal canine on fast-forward won't produce much than lots of  
> happy barking, virtually gnawn bones, and tail-chasing.
>
> The problem with the "fast" canine example may be that the canine  
> brain may not have either the (a) the capacity; or (b) the proper  
> internal neural sub-nets to ever perform the function Einstein's  
> brain did (recognition of some rather unusual laws of physics).   
> They might however have the internal subnets to extract information  
> from smell data which humans completely lack.  (Say for example the  
> "claimed" ability to be able to identify people who have cancer (or  
> some types of cancer) based on smell.)
>
> Running a neural network faster doesn't make it "better" at least  
> for some things... A human brain on fast forward may still have a  
> problem doing what some precisely adapted neural nets (an octopus  
> or squid with highly precise sensory system processing and  
> precision control of multiple arms) are capable of.  At the same  
> time I don't believe those neural networks aren't particularly good  
> at algebraic (symbolic) manipulation no matter how fast you run them.
>
> Einstein's brain may have had a unique neural structure so that it  
> was able to make connections or recognize patterns that other  
> brains simply could not (at least very easily).  Having (a) more  
> memory capacity (human vs. a dog for example) or (b) better spatial  
> manipulation capabilities ( e.g. those brains which can solve a  
> Rubik's Cube [1] very quickly) or (c) better language sequencing  
> capabilities (William Falkner comes to mind) may be things where  
> faster does not equal more creative.  Though my general take on  
> much "intelligence" right now is that similar brains (with ~ equal  
> capacity and structure) can deal with almost anything given enough  
> information, training and time.  Raw "speed" may help in getting  
> from point A to point Z faster.  It is interesting to consider  
> whether raw capacity (as compared to raw speed) is essential for  
> solving the Professor's Cube [2].  This brings to mind space vs.  
> speed trade offs in computer systems.
>
> It raises the interesting question as to whether Einstein would  
> have been able to deduce a "Theory of Everything" had his brain not  
> been aging (over time brains do lose neurons) and/or had he been  
> given another hundred or two hundred years to work on the problem?
>
> Robert
> 1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubik%27s_Cube
> 2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professor%27s_Cube
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20060511/99092185/attachment.html>