- #1
Tiiba
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There is a computer forum and a brain forum. I don't know which to choose. But I'll go here.
Computers made more progress in the last ten years than cars did in the last hundred. But Blue Gene still falls short of the speed attributed to three pounds of goo in my head (20 quadrillion ops per second, according to Ray Kurzweil). As I understand, the reason is heat - if all the computing power of Blue Gene was packed into three pounds, it would melt. But the brain does all its work on 20 watts - one per petaflop per second.
Why is there such a big difference in power consumption? Lots of people have imitated neural networks, but have there been any attempts to build an artificial neural network that uses energy like the real one? An attempt to find out got me to a discussion of why neurons use MORE energy than they should...
Computers made more progress in the last ten years than cars did in the last hundred. But Blue Gene still falls short of the speed attributed to three pounds of goo in my head (20 quadrillion ops per second, according to Ray Kurzweil). As I understand, the reason is heat - if all the computing power of Blue Gene was packed into three pounds, it would melt. But the brain does all its work on 20 watts - one per petaflop per second.
Why is there such a big difference in power consumption? Lots of people have imitated neural networks, but have there been any attempts to build an artificial neural network that uses energy like the real one? An attempt to find out got me to a discussion of why neurons use MORE energy than they should...