IBM regains supercomputer bragging rights

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That's ridiculous; off by many, many orders of magnitude

Firstly, "flops" don't really apply to the human
brain; you don't natively process floating point
numbers. So if we were measuring your ability to
process 64-bit floating-point numbers, then any of
us would be lucky to achieve 1 flop per several
minutes, and only that when assisted by the
intermediate storage of paper and pencil.

But lets take a more general "op". A human brain
contains about (number varies) 100 billion neurons.
Each neuron contains as many as (number varies)
15,000 synapses (electrical connections to
neighboring neurons). A neuron cycles at maybe
100 Hz, tops.

Multiplying all this out, we get a number that's
in your range: 15 peta synapse operations per
second. But these synapse operations are far
less than a flop; they much more like a single
gate (or even small fraction of a gate) in a
modern logic circuit. (Remember, neurons may have
15,000 inputs, but they only have one output! It
may be a variable-rate, quasi-analog signal, but
it's still only a single signal.)

Because the human brain is composed of many
individual, massively-parallel functional units,
it's almost impossible to assign a speed rating
to it. But it's pretty clear that our super-
computers are starting to have as much functional
capacity as a standard-issue human brain. What
the supercomputers are clearly missing is the
correct operating software.

Posted by: Atlant   Posted on: 06/22/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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