[ExI] AI Motivation revisited

[Eugen Leitl]

On Thu, Jun 30, 2011 at 06:30:32PM +0200, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> "Real time" is the crucial thing here.
> 
> If you have an Intel i8088 with a sufficiently high pile of floppies, and
> performance is not an issue, you can model (and emulate) any system with a
> finite set of statuses, as you can with a group of people playing logic
> circuit in a plain.

No, you can't. Human activities are short-lived, so you're
limited to less than 10 years. 0.6 MIPS (no FPU). Floppy
is 360 kBytes, and for pracical reasons you can't use more
than 10 k of these, so it's about 4 GByte of state.
A 360 kBytes floppy writes at about 32 kBytes/s, so you
need over 100 days just to write these once. Add handling,
wear, diagnostics and error correction and you can 
easily multiply that by 2 or more.

As a crude estimate, a modern PC does a decade of above 
in much less than a second.
 
> OTOH, I am by no means certain that organic brains are so poorly optimised
> to run "AGI" programs in comparison with other conceivable, eg, silicon,
> supports.

It's the opposite. When Sun (vanquished by Orkcackle) said
that the network is the computer they spoke truer than they
knew. Silicon has lousy fanout, and modern systems are
extremely poor at parallelism. Which is why you need huge
clusters with millions of cores to do something quite
trivial.

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