Re: Intelligence

[John Clarke <johnc@xxxxxxxxx>]

WARNING: very little about go in what follows, just my pet personal
rant.

> I'm rememinded of 19'th centrury science, trying to estimate
> the amount of coal it would take to power the sun, because that
> was the most compact type of power source know at the time.
> 
>  Trying to measure human brainpower in bytes is the same kind of thing.

Yow!  I'm surprised that so many people on this list think that there
is something really special (magical?) about human intelligence that
is hard (impossible?) to replicate in a machine.

The whole point of the sun-as-a-burning-lump-of-coal calculation was
to show that ordinary combustion could be ruled out as a possible
source of the sun's energy production.  People had known(*) -- from
spectroscopy -- that the sun was made almost exclusively of hydrogen
for nearly a hundred years at that point.  No-one really thought that
actual coal was involved since they knew there was no carbon or indeed
oxygen to burn it with.  The mystery of how stars shine wasn't solved
until nearly a hundred years later.

The point is: they knew there was a mystery.  They didn't know about
nuclear fusion.

There is currently no case that human intelligence is mysterious or
unexplainable.

What we have is a neural net with 10^10 neurons each with up to 10^4
connections with each connection in (roughly) one of 8 states (i.e. 3
bits per connection).  Recently we've discovered that the way in
which the strength of the synapses response changes is also governed
by the relative timing of impulses to other synapses i.e. that the
neurons do a little more than just multiply, add and threshold but
there is nothing yet that can't in principle be simulated.

Be generous and call it 10^14 bytes of storage i.e. 100 terabytes.
I have a friend who works with 4 terabyte disk farms and they're
planning 1-200 terabyte ones.  (Telco's use them to store billing
information.)

There's a Prof. at Oxford who has simulated every cell in the human
heart (admittedly a much easier job) and his model has already been
used in the approval of a new drug.

It's just a matter of time before the brain is simulated.

What does all this tell us about go?  You should be able to play like
a pro with less than 100 terabytes of storage!

John

(*)Intersting footnote: the discovery that the sun was made of hydrogen
came only five years after an eminent philospher declared that humanity
would _never_ know what stars were made of, and that consequently
scientists should stop trying and listen to philosophers instead.