

Supercomputers vs Human Brain - vikram_tiwari

The world&#x27;s fastest supercomputer (TH-2) requires 24 million Watts of power, but still needs to be about 100,000 times faster to match our 20 Watt brain.<p>I compare this to Vacuum Tubes vs Semiconductors specs. Aren&#x27;t we somehow reaching limits of semiconductors as well and should look for better alternatives instead? #AskHN
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b6
I don't know why people find it so tempting to compare brains and computers.
Maybe because it seems like computers are figuring things out? But they
aren't, they're just scooting numbers around and adding and whatnot. They're
Cadillac calculators. Anyone can understand what a computer does, but we might
never understand what a brain does. I try to be scientifically-minded and am
not prone to mysticism, but consciousness is basically magic. I think it's
likely we'll make an artificial brain that works about like ours do, without
having any idea why consciousness shows up out of nowhere to make use of it.

You say it takes a supercomputer to match a brain, but a $1 processor will
easily beat a human if the task is to add a bunch of numbers, or even just to
carefully do something over and over.

I do think there's some fascinating organic/analog vs digital thing going on.
Humans took a weird evolutionary branch, got weirdly smart, and lit the
technology bomb. Now it looks like our bioslime will give rise to intelligent
machines that won't have our frailties or evolutionary baggage, for whom a
thousand years is no big deal, who can actually reach the stars if they want
to. Ever more complicated kinds of life, using the previous kind of life as a
stepping stone.

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memming
What's the evidence that "still needs to be about 100,000 times faster to
match our 20 Watt brain"?

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vikram_tiwari
Relevant(?): [http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/for-one-second-a-
supercompu...](http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/for-one-second-a-
supercomputer-mimicked-the-human-brain)

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memming
They do this kind of publicity stunt all the time. Simulating a _model_ of
biological neural network doesn't mean much. We don't know how the brain works
yet.

