
IBM is trying to solve computing scaling issues with electronic ‘blood’ - saidajigumi
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/11/5d-electronic-blood-ibms-secret-sauce-for-computers-with-biological-brain-like-efficiency/
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ryanmarsh
The top comment:

"I look forward to the day I need to do an urgent transfusion between two
laptops and need to look up whether someone's Dell has the same bloodtype as
my Surface."

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aconz2
Very cool idea.

One thing I think is often overlooked in comparing brains with computers is
that while they may be ahead on efficiency and density, computers win on many
other metrics eg. They are easy to reprogram, they don't need sleep, etc.

And I'm curious how exactly brains are measured for operations per unit
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jerf
"And I'm curious how exactly brains are measured for operations per unit
<blank>"

Estimations via a variety of methodologies that all yield different answers.
Since brains and computers run such fundamentally different "programs", the
details matter less than you might think, because the whole question starts as
pretty hopeless in the first place. One approach is "what would it take a
modern computer to fully simulate a brain", which is in some sense throwing a
huge advantage to the biological brain because the same measure in the
opposite direction makes biological brains look _really_ bad, far worse than
this measure makes computers look!

Still, while the computations may not be generic, there is certainly a _lot_
of stuff going on in a biological brain, no matter how you look at it. Note
the graph is on a log-log scale; differences of opinions will tend to move the
biological systems a little bit one way or the other on the graph, it won't
tend to suddenly fling it halfway across.

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hanniabu
When you think about our brains, this makes a lot of sense and one of those
things that seem obvious in hindsight. Our brains are efficient and have high
computing power, but why don't they heat up? Because liquid (blood) is
constantly flowing through it to keep it cool. But unlike traditional liquid
cooled computers, blood also powers our brain.

What I'd like to know, which I don't think they mentioned in the article, is
if the fluid actually runs through the chips silicon wafers like the other
technique discussed later in the article.

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saalweachter
Our brains also use far less energy than almost any computer but your cell
phone.

2500 kilocalories / day = 120 Watts. Your brain is something like a quarter of
that, so about 30 Watts for your brain.

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hyperion2010
This is true, but without the blood to carry excess heat away your brain would
still heat up to the point where its cells would no longer be able to function
and you would die (only need in increase of about ~3C).

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snowwrestler
Imagine a device that can be powered and cooled by the oxygen and blood sugar
in human blood. It would permit the creation of embedded medical devices that
would be nearly permanent. No need to change battery--just eat more!

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shaftoe
Neal Stephenson covered this in The Diamond Age. People formed a massively
parallel computer that performed computations in their blood stream with
nanites and shared data between hosts via "fluid transfers."

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amatus
They didn't quite solve the cooling problem though ;)

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mmmBacon
Very interesting research but they do their SW in Labview?

