I hate to have to nitpick abbreviations of Latin, but in part 3B you mean “e.g.”, not “i.e.”. (And now I’ve confused myself on whether to include that last period.)

Take a simple Scrabble game I play online, the official version. The game gives the human player 3 “Best Word” options per game, where the best possible word from my tiles and the tiles on the board, is calculated and suggested. But doesn’t my computer opponent give itself a “Best Word” at every single turn it has? I assume that it does, so I have no guilt or lost pride whatsoever in taking my allotted freebies from the computer. My question is this: My scores trounce my cyber opponent. How does that happen, if computers are programmed to give themselves the best possible route to complete whatever command is given them?

And where does quantum physics/mechanics fit in? Do computers perform to the best of HUMAN expectation because we may live in a quantum universe where the big scale is a blow-up of the microcosm? How can it not be otherwise?

As I said, I have only a philosophical interest in these compelling considerations.

Just a shout out of support.

I have to admit I’ve always personally defined the “singularity” as a convergence between man/technology. I don’t understand why we need all these different narrow titles for it. Why not just define it as a point in the future when the nature of man is different enough from our current state so as to be considered a new species/entity (however it occurs)? Call it homo-singularitus? No need for pseudo-religious nerdy dogma here. Arguing about future specifics seems stupid and pointless as we have no idea how new disruptive technologies will change us, society or anything for that matter. Why not just happily speculate and leave it at that?

P.S. One point you did leave out as I think it might have gone outside the scope of the article is that we already have technology to improve the right side of our brains. Drugs, wether natural or synthetic. I’m sure there’s room for that in there too somewhere.

“Allow me to repeat your words: if you measure the right thing, i.e. how many flops each neuron can do per lifetime. Right there you’re saying that you’re out to compare how many activations a neuron can have in its existence to the number of seconds it will take on a CPU and call it the proper thing to measure, then proceed to do exactly that.”

I’m comparing the # of spikes a neuron has in its lifetime to the # of flops a cpu can perform in its lifetime. There is NO simulating involved in this, so whatever you wrote about virtual neurons is utterly irrelevant – it’s just the number of “elementary computations” per lifetime, where “elementary computation” is different for each computational device (neuron/cpu).

It’s really not that hard – turn off that desire to just instantly type smth long, useless and unrelated and just read the posts with the comprehension part of your brain turned on.

I don’t have much more to say – you just seem interested in writing elementary stuff as if it’s some kind of high knowledge (like the voltage thing or what a flop is or what a hz is, lol), and are not at all interested in understanding others’ ideas or learning anything new – and that’s the pretentious and tiring bit.

p.s. http://tinyurl.com/6x42bus
p.p.s. it occurs to me you might also be confused about “proper time”, which was a physics comment directed at Bee – if you are – the same trick as in the above link should help

Odd, I didn’t get the memo that pointing out mistakes on someone’s part was now pretentious. Was there a part of the memo where I’m supposed to give people medals for merely trying to sound like they know what they’re talking about?

“The 1khz frequency (zomg I used Hz’s!!!, just wait until I get to other units)…”

Being petulant now does not correct for the fact that you used three different, unrelated measuring units at first and it took three posts from me until you actually started using ones that apply. You made a mistake. It happens to everyone. But I guess arguing on the web means never having to say that you’re wrong.

“… is the (maximal) frequency of action potential spikes in a spike train. Google/wiki is your friend if you need more info.”

So you can’t post a link to something supporting this assertion… why again? It’s not my job to find proof for your assertions, it’s your job to provide them when making said assertions. And we suddenly went from the 1 KHz mark being a neuron’s routine day to the maximum capacity of the signals it gets. Hmm, how does that work?

Your entire idea is ridiculous for the simple reason that your virtual neuron is virtual and this has an unlimited lifetime, and the poster to whom you were replying was just trying to note that our bodies can repair themselves while machines can’t, so machines wear out faster than we do. Your explanation of how quickly a machine can run through however many byte manipulations you need it to run though has nothing to say about the durability of neurons or computers, nor does it have anything to do with whether or not computers can simulate a neuron. They can. We know that already.

“neuronal algebra: just like with normal algebra, where you arrange inputs together with pluses, minuses, functions, etc to get an output, you could arrange neurons to e.g. take as an input two numbers and output the sum or other algebraic functions.”

Oh for the sake of FSM’s sweet noodly appendages… Would you like your virtual neurons to also do a can-can while they’re at it and we can measure that as a performance benchmark? I mean as long as we’re going to throw every benchmark in the world at them, we might as well, right? Doesn’t matter that you’re now trying to use neurons as a Half Adder or Full Adder rather than as neurons, but I suppose it sure beats having to say “I got my terminology mixed up in the first post.”

“And DUH lifetime in seconds is different from lifetime in neops, that was the entire point of my initial post – lifetime in seconds is a BAD measure of lifetime if you want to compare it to the cpu lifetime.”

*headdesk*

Did you even read your own damn post? You were doing exactly that! Here, though my evil magic powers as a computer wizard, I’m going to scroll up, and copy/paste what you said on the matter into a blockquote tag. Ready?

This is actually very easy, if you measure the right thing (proper time if you will), e.g. if you measure smth [sic] like how many flops can each do per lifetime. Recall that human brains are very large parallel machines with each neuron performing very slow computations. If we assume that a neuron lives 100 years, performing 1000 computations per second*, then the “flop” lifetime of the neuron is about 3T flops, which is less than 20 minutes for a modern PC.

Key point bolded for emphasis, just to help those suffering a sudden bout of short-term amnesia. Allow me to repeat your words: if you measure the right thing, i.e. how many flops each neuron can do per lifetime. Right there you’re saying that you’re out to compare how many activations a neuron can have in its existence to the number of seconds it will take on a CPU and call it the proper thing to measure, then proceed to do exactly that. Please don’t tell me that you were somehow arguing that this was a bad approach.

No, what happened is that you were caught with a serious case of web-based foot-in-mouth disease and proceeded to try and massage your mistakes away by sounding as condescendingly pseudo-scientifically obtuse as possible until you brought the whole thing around and just re-stated a part of what I said in my initial response to your point. It’s the same thing politicians do when they make a statement about everyone on Medicare being a leech off the system; after getting enough angry mail, they issue a non-apology in which they say that they were just making a point that there are those who think that everyone on Medicare is just leeching off the system, that they they certainly don’t think that, and that they’re sorry that some pretentious know-it-alls didn’t quite catch up to their genius social commentary.

I think we’re done here, though if you want to fume about being called out on your ignorance, changing your story, and how I’m such a nasty so-and-so, then by all means do proceed. Since there’s nothing scientific to debate there, I’m not interested in continuing down that road.

To the point now: talking about beta-waves in this context is like talking about the frequency of the blinking of hdd light in the context of measuring lifetime of a cpu (not that the lower frequency of beta waves is doing kindness to your arguments). The 1khz frequency (zomg I used Hz’s!!!, just wait until I get to other units) is the (maximal) frequency of action potential spikes in a spike train. Google/wiki is your friend if you need more info.

Re neuronal algebra: just like with normal algebra, where you arrange inputs together with pluses, minuses, functions, etc to get an output, you could arrange neurons to e.g. take as an input two numbers and output the sum or other algebraic functions. This is what was meant by neuronal algebra – trying to mimic our algebra by using neurons as fundamental operational units. The most simple example of this would be using a single-input linear potential neuron to simulate a 1-d linear function (this is a fake example as real-life neurons are non-linear, but you can think of doing this in a small range where they are actually linear).

And DUH lifetime in seconds is different from lifetime in neops, that was the entire point of my initial post – lifetime in seconds is a BAD measure of lifetime if you want to compare it to the cpu lifetime.