[ExI] Human Brain Project kicks off today

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Oct 09, 2013 at 12:16:05PM -0700, Keith Henson wrote:
> > From: Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com>
> 
> > How many Eugens could you fit in the head of a pin (make it a sphere
> > 3/16 inch diameter)?
> 
> 27 years ago Eric Drexler worked this out and got around a 10 cm cube
> "volume of a coffee cup" for a human capacity hardware.  With enough
> power and cooling it would run a million times faster than a meat
> state human.

Nanosystems uses an engineering analysis based on diamond rod logic.
Deliberately conservatively, in order to be easy analyzable. There
are a few problematic assumptions there as well. So it is an answer,
but not an exhaustive one.

We now pretty much know that nothing exactly like that will be built.
There are alternatives, but they're not easy to analyze, and it's
really hard to estimate how well a particular computational model
(of which many parts are yet unknown) is mapping to a different substrate.
Once we have living critters in EFlops systems we can make a much
better estimate.
 
> It's in Engines of Creation.