As the cubes get smaller and more powerful, allowing more and more interconnections within and between them, the brain will eventually lose its processing edge. With an estimated average of one thousand connections between each neuron and its neighbors, we have about 100 trillion connections, each capable of a simultaneous calculation. But it's not a strength that will remain superior to machine intelligence for very long. In the following conversation with Ray Kurzweil, he takes on a few such questions about our increasingly intelligent machines. My field is pattern recognition, the part of artificial intelligence where we try to build computers that can recognize patterns.
Pattern recognition is a large part of intuition.
It's now known that the human brain principally uses pattern recognition as its means of cognition. For instance, that's how a chessmaster plays chess, in contrast to the primary computer method of playing chess. A human being doesn't have time to think through billions of possible sequences in the minute or so one has to make a chess move, so what the chessmaster does instead is use his or her pattern recognition capabilities to recognize a pattern that's similar to one used previously. Top-ranked players have mastered an estimated fifty to one hundred thousand board positions, and have thought through them during a long career. In our work in computers, a similar approach has proved the most fruitful.