

Researcher calls the human brain freakishly efficient as a computer - sayemm
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/health/4282040.html

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photon_off
Here's the freakishly quote: _"...Garry Kasparov's brain is freakishly
efficient, it's running on about 23 watts while Deep Blue doesn't know how to
use energy that efficiently. So, one of the problems that biological computers
have solved is how to take in energy and turn it almost into, magically,
freakishly efficient computation."_

The analogy should work both ways, though. I'm pretty sure Kasparov couldn't
add 100 billion numbers together inside of a second, either. Nor is there any
amortization of the cost of his currently 23-watt brain; how about the energy
expended during years of development of his brain, whereas the computer could
be produced with relatively low energy cost?

It should be of no surprise that humans are efficient at calculating things of
survival importance, like emotion, decisions, etc. Over the span of billions
of years, across tens of millions of square kilometers, under an algorithm
where failure means permanent termination, our brains have evolved out of
necessity to be that efficient. To me, it is far more freakish how efficient
computers are at doing what they do. In under a second, _billions_ of
computations can occur in my several year old machine, all in some exact
order, and without error. With that in mind, it's even more freakish that it
often takes so much time to open Firefox.

~~~
modeless
The time it takes to open Firefox is dominated not by computation but by
waiting for the correct chunks of data to rotate past your hard disk's read
head. Even with an SSD I/O bandwidth and latency are probably still the
bottlenecks. Even assuming disk I/O took zero time, it's likely that loading
Firefox would still dominated by waiting, this time for cache misses.

------
olalonde
IMO, title should have been "Researcher calls the human brain, described as a
computer, freakishly efficient". The original title makes it look like the
author meant the brain is as much efficient as a computer.

