So IBM apparently has a chip based on nano-fluids that is equivalent to the power of 1 million human neurons and requires only the power of a hearing aid. What's the catch?

Uuuuuuuughhhhhhhhhh. No, you just don't understand anything.

that does not mean I lack the capacity or desire to understand.

Yes, yes it does. You are a beginner college student in a completely different field and you haven't even done Calculus I which is the very first math class (of many) CS and engineering students are expected to take. Everything involved is so beyond you but for some reason you think you're "smart" even though you don't know anything about anything.

When you say 'the human brain can actually be emulated with 1's and 0's and the current implementation may not be the best set of 1's and 0's' what you mean is 'the human brain can be emulated' as it can also be emulated with 0's 1's and any other symbol. The inefficiency comes with the fact that you need so many 1's and 0's to represent 1 neural impulse in the context of the brain.

Gah, no. This is what I'm talking about. You don't understand anything. You can change the hardware to be EXACTLY like a human brain and then the 1's and 0's would be processed infinitely faster. This isn't even mentioning the fact that, afaik, we don't know how everything in the brain is connected yet to build a hardware version of it. The hardware is not currently designed like that and so there are a bunch of hoops to jump through to get the desired result. If you made specialized hardware then the computer would be better than any human at any human process (but then it would be slower at traditional computer processes). You don't understand trade-off's, hardware, software abstraction, etc.

The inefficiency comes with the fact that you need so many 1's and 0's to represent 1 neural impulse in the context of the brain.

No, just no. You do understand that a computer literally does billions of operations (not even including overlapping instructions, parallel instructions, and distributed computing) every second right? The human brain doesn't even compare.

Look, what you don't understand is that the difference between a junior in university and a senior in high school is the same difference between a senior in high school and a kid in elementary. The difference between someone with a master's and a junior in university is the same. The difference between someone that just got their PhD and a master's is the same. The difference between a veteran professor and someone who just got their PhD is the same.

You are at such a level of understanding that no matter how simple I make my explanation to you it is still so far beyond your comprehension. That's ok!!! That's normal! Seriously, your common sense logic does not apply! "Why don't we just do this..." is a very common thing people at your level say. Then you get to a higher level and you understand that not only was your question wrong, your entire concept of how things worked was wrong.

/r/computerscience Thread Parent