🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <peora.2121> jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) writes:
>> With all the talk about performance metrics, consider this:
>>
>> How many MIPS does a single brain neuron have?
>>
>>
>> I ask this because it seems we don't need to compute faster, but
>> to compute better.  After all, brain cells have switching times in
>> the MILLIsecond range.  How does the brain do it?  We should probably
>> start small, so how about the question:
>>
>> Does any hardware currently exist that matches the real-time computational
>> ability of a housefly?
>
>The thing is, the brain doesn't seem to do computing the way current-day
>machines do;...  				... Think about how people
>do arithmetic operations, for example... they do it by table lookup!...
>
>if you think of it in terms of a table, table entries tend to "attract"
>nearby guesses, so that from an approximation you get pulled into the
>memorized answer. (Likewise, if you make an initial guess that is nearer
>to another (wrong) answer, you may get pulled to that one instead and have
>trouble finding the right answer as a result.) Very simple published
>algorithms (albeit slow ones on a sequential machine) exist for modelling
>simple forms of this operation...

Which brings to mind the question:  if we designed a computer as good as a
brain, would it also be as bad as a brain?

>							...How many
>mathematicians really admit "I was just sitting eating lunch and idly
>thinking about how to prove this theorem, and suddenly it occurred to me
>out of nowhere."?)

The chemist Kekule several times described his 1857 discovery of the structure
of benzene as having come to him in a a vision, while gazing at a fire.  
(Benzene is a ring;  he "saw" the ancient alchemical symbol of the ourobouros,
a snake swallowing its tail.)  Recently, John Wotiz, a chemistry professor at
Southern Illinois University, has ridiculed the idea that this is the way it
happened, claiming that it Kekule derived the structure by "hard work" instead 
of mysical insight.  (Personally, I see no contradiction between the two;  
answers to hard questions usually occur to me while I'm driving home after
a hard-working, frustrating day of getting nowhere with the problem.)

Peter S. Shenkin	 Columbia Univ. Biology Dept., NY, NY  10027
{philabs,rna}!cubsvax!peters		cubsvax!peters@columbia.ARPA