Whats the clock speed/flops per second of our brains? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 01:48:29 am
content: If our brains were computers what would the clock speed be? How many flops per second could it produce, and how much ram/cache and drive space would it need figuring 30-40 years old?What would be the difference in some one with an IQ of 80 and 140(conveniently my average IQ) or some one with 170 like Einstein?

author: Melt-O-Tronic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 02:02:41 am
content: What's the length of a snake's stride?

author: vad
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 02:08:59 am
content: An average person can’t perform simple arithmetic operations on arbitrary singe-precious floating point numbers in memory. So I would say 0 FLOPS in memory, ~0.02 FLOPS with paper and pencil, ~0.2 FLOPS with scientific calculator, and up-to 1 exaFLOPS with modern computer.

author: DrG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 02:10:03 am
content: Quote from: Beamin on February 06, 2021, 01:48:29 amI'm afraid that my answer is going to disappoint, but here goes:When this kind of question is asked, it usually gets answered in terms of neural conduction. IOW how long does it take for a neuron to fire...the time from being activated to the time to activate the next neuron or muscle or whatever. It depends on a lot of factors, but you can look these up on Wikiwonderfulhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nerve_conduction_velocityEven the fastest ones are very slow compared to the kinds of standards and measures you are bringing up.I have never read any evidence at all that a healthy person with a lower IQ has slower neurons than one with higher IQ - it just doesn't work that way.But, that should not bother you at all because the fastest computers were designed and built and programmed by human brains

author: JohnnyMalaria
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 02:22:01 am
content: How many MFLOPS must a computer achieve before it can simply just know instinctively it exists?And why denigrate the extraordinary reality that is your consciousness by comparing it to a how fast a bunch of NAND gates can respond to electrical impulses?Tat tvam asi.

author: amyk
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 02:33:07 am
content: Biological brains are more like FPGAs, with self-reconfiguration.Massively parallel but not fast at sequential tasks.

author: JohnnyMalaria
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 02:42:54 am
content: Quote from: amyk on February 06, 2021, 02:33:07 amSelf-reconfiguration and self-recognition.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 02:44:45 am
content: Around 10E12 to 10E28 flops.Source:https://aiimpacts.org/brain-performance-in-flops/#:~:text=Among%20a%20small%20number%20of,%E2%80%93%206.4%20*%201014%20TEPS.

author: alpher
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 03:38:30 am
content: Quote from: DrG on February 06, 2021, 02:10:03 amAre you sure?And I don't mean aliens etc. Just curious if isn't AI playing a role there?

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 04:45:52 am
content: This is one of those problems of comparing apples to cows. One way to come up with an answer is to see how many FLOPS or TeraFLOPS it takes to perform comparable tasks to the human brain. Right now there are no electronic computers that can do everything the human brain does, but Deep Blue plays chess and Jeopardy at somewhat above human levels and vision systems can do some significant parts of what the human brain does. Various sources rate Deep Blue at 10 to 100 GFLOPS (the differences are due to ongoing upgrades, but the ratings aren't well tied to the chess or Jeopardy successes).Many of the other functions of the brain (keeping the heart and lungs going, doing balance and motion and so on) aren't particularly challenging. As ATLAS and other robots have demonstrated relatively modest computing power is required.The open question is how much computing power is required for consciousness. No one can answer that. May be more or less than playing Jeopardy.The following paper has some interesting ways to estimate the equivalence and comes up with much larger numbershttps://www.openphilanthropy.org/brain-computation-report

author: retiredfeline
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 04:51:28 am
content: 10 flops per project.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 05:21:33 am
content: Somewhere around 10 Hz to globally synchronize. Submodules can tune in to finer divisions of time, for instance in playing or listening to music.In terms of "FLOPS" (floating point operations per second) perhaps 0.0001, with external storage? Testing is easy, just multiply two 20-digit decimal fractions in your headRare individuals called "calculating savants" can do much faster, of course.

author: emece67
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 09:22:27 am
content: .

author: ebastler
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 11:48:55 am
content: Quote from: Beamin on February 06, 2021, 01:48:29 amReads like a thinly veiled "Let me brag about my claimed IQ" post...I will resist debating the merits of the claim.

author: Syntax Error
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 12:23:22 pm
content: First, do your head in reading about the brain's transistor, theneuron. Then decide if the FLOP is a valid analogy?http://www.tulane.edu/~h0Ward/BrLg/Neuron.htmlExtract:Quote

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 06, 2021, 11:28:13 pm
content: Quote from: ebastler on February 06, 2021, 11:48:55 amAnd "FLOPS per second" is pleonasm.

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 07, 2021, 04:25:51 am
content: Here are a bunch of videos to answer all sorts of questions about neuroscience:https://www.youtube.com/c/neurotransmissions/videosQuote from: ebastler on February 06, 2021, 11:48:55 amWhich is a very "synthetic" benchmark anyways. Even just within the realm of electronics engineering, there are so many specializations that no single test can fully explore one's skills.Quote from: amyk on February 06, 2021, 02:33:07 amThat basically means that unless there's a major brain defect, the potential intelligence at a given age probably doesn't vary much between individuals and it's really a question of how well the "programming" can use it. And what it's "optimized" to do, for that matter.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 07, 2021, 04:54:48 am
content: The brain is analog and is not architected anything like a computer so I don't know how you'd ever really make this comparison. As someone else said, massively parallel and recofigurable but not really very fast. There are some things that computers really struggle at that are trivial even for a person of below average intelligence, like identifying spam from legitimate email or spotting recognizable objects in a complex image. Other things like solving mathematical equations a computer can do vastly faster than the most gifted human minds. A brain is not running code, it's not executing instructions, it's more like a fully analog FPGA.

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 07, 2021, 12:36:16 pm
content: Quote from: james_s on February 07, 2021, 04:54:48 amI don't understand how the brain can be said to be 'analog' ??It's more like a 'CPU' that'svariablyintegrated within RAM. And it surely multi-tasks, when at the same time ascontrolling sub-conscious things like heart rate, body temperature etc etc, it can decipher what we READ, or are readingat the same time as feel & react to stimulus like a mosquito biting, and interrupting voices being heard/comprehended!Is that a 'parallel' system, or are there equivalent 'processor' Interrupts, to pause and re-direct!!I've been recently reading about so-called 'Speed-Reading'. There is a delay while the brain has to control our eyes, toscan across words in a sentence. And our brain also luckily does not have to read the individual 'letters', as we are nowaccustomed to see each word as a 'Picture', and know what it is. The problem though, is that even if/when our 'brain'is correctly 'interpreting' the words it has stored, we are NOT necessarily RETAINING the information properly, when acertain speed of 'reading' has been crossed. (Proportionally). At that point, our 'brain' Flops, have Flopped!!

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 08, 2021, 01:17:28 am
content: Quote from: GlennSprigg on February 07, 2021, 12:36:16 pmWell would you argue that it's binary? Or hexadecimal? Or something else? Neurons have variable response, as far as I know they are not either on or off like a digital bit and the brain doesn't really deal in numerical values natively. There are no discrete brightness steps the eye can detect for example, the more photons hit the receptor cell in the retina the more strongly it reacts. There is no analog to digital conversion between our sensory and the brain, it is directly connected. The brain isn't executing instructions, it is more like a massively parallel collection of analog circuits that are all wired up to do whatever task they do, many of these can be monitored or controlled to various degrees with our conscious mind. We can only really focus on one thing at a time but other things can grab our focus, but there are many things that can operate with some autonomy in the background.

author: Beamin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2021, 01:45:09 am
content: Quote from: ebastler on February 06, 2021, 11:48:55 amIm sure many on this board are above my IQ. This is why I like this board so much I feel intellectually humble, and its fun to pick the brains that are smarter then mine. Some people here are way above my head and I have to spend 5-10 minutes googling their posts just to understand what they are talking about. I think my brain has an 8086 ( at 3.4 MHz, the switch to 7 is broken) in it with a broken math co-processor, and 64k ram; 60 of which is used up to keep me breathing and standing upright. And the real time clock battery is leaking.

author: LaserSteve
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2021, 03:18:12 am
content: The challenge i like to give to undergraduates on our robotics team is how many lines of code do you need to fully emulate an ant, then accurately run a puppy. I don't know the answer, nor how you cram an Atmel 328 into an ant.Throw in dolphin or bat FM-CW Sonar Imaging to make it even more interesting. FM-CW is a rudimentary mode for both species, actual waveforms used are far more sophisticated.Usually that gets me a very puzzled look from the freshmen, and mirth from the seniors, who know I don't expect an answer. Team is a mix of CE, EE. Comp Sci, ME and some marketing students.Steve

author: GlennSprigg
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2021, 11:38:28 am
content: Quote from: Beamin on February 10, 2021, 01:45:09 amDon't put yourself down!! The old C-64 computer had more power than what took men to the Moon !!

author: S. Petrukhin
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2021, 12:23:18 pm
content: There are people whose flops come from an external kick generator...And some often require a reboot with a shovel kick.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2021, 02:37:11 pm
content: Comparing performance measures of different architectures is hard, or even useless, because they are not the same.In that sense, even IQ is debatable whether it really represents anything. Some IQ tests include language, numbers, etc. Does it also mean that people who have dyslexia or dyscalculia are dumber? I doubt both should have an effect on the score, however, the way they consume and process information is 'different'. Herein lies a crucial observation that expressing IQ as a scalar value is kind of useless: some people have perfect memory while others can string together many different concepts while needing to look up everything they use.As far as I read into, I believe that IQ is a weighted average of several of these factors. Important pillars of good IQ performance are then short and long term memory and the ability to associate different concepts with the observations presented at present time. I think the latter is quite a fundamental measure of 'brain performance', as learning and understanding is basically all about it.Then trying to compare brain vs computers becomes hard. Computers have memory storage expressed in bytes and computational power often expressed in FLOPS. However, in a sense even our human cognitive computations are also associations. We have learned that the numbers go like [1, 2, 3, 4], etc. and we have learned what the mechanics of addition, subtraction or multiplication is (e.g. that 2-1=1). However, if one had learned that numbers went like [1, 3, 2, 4], then he/she may still be able to perform computations quickly (e.g. 2-1=3), but perhaps not correct to our typical conventions. Likewise in computers, 2's complement is not the only way of storing an integer, and relearning number systems and observing redundant number systems is quite an interesting philosophy on how we can treat computations more efficiently.What I mean to say is; the concepts we treat as cognitive computational power are, in a sense, also memory lookups of a convention that we take for granted. The brain is a huge association machine, which is more like a massive FPGA with lots of block RAM spread around..In terms of the processing the brain does to give us consciousness is far in excess what a typical computer will do, especially relative to the energy the brain consumes. If you only look at the visual cortex and the speed at which we recognize objects at different illumination levels, orientations and shape variants... it's very very impressive. We probably need far far more powerful computers to even come close to matching it.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 10, 2021, 10:13:08 pm
content: Quote from: hans on February 10, 2021, 02:37:11 pmIf different architectures can be applied to the same problems, their performance is comparable, by definition.QuoteIn normal times it would be uncontroversial to state that an intellectual disability was disabling. We live in more interesting times, where stating the truth unfortunately requires more courage.QuoteUnlike Borges's tragic Funes, no one has "perfect memory". The patterns of information processing and retrieval in humans are universal, not "different". Individuals rely more on some patterns than others.QuoteYou are incorrect, and perhaps mislead by your reading. IQ is an attempt to estimate the factorG, which is the shared factor in mental ability across different domains. Individual performance in one domain correlates strongly to other domains. "Learning and understanding" is meaningless without an operational definition.QuoteI'm not sure how to properly respond to this. The numbers in a number system are defined by their relationships, not by the squiggles we use to write them. This is how all early mathematics education is structured, for example with the use of counters to demonstrate identities and inequalities. The figures that represent the numbers are conventions, but the numbers themselves are not. So if you exchanged the numerals "2" and "3", that is simply a different way of writing. The properties of the successor of the successor of the additive identity (conventionally known as "2") are not changed by this. This does not give rise to a "different method of computations".The method of representation of a number in a computer's memory does not define any mathematical structure. It is an implementation detail much like ASCII or EBCDIC. The implementation of the machine's operations had better match this representation, to give "correct answers" in mathematical terms. But there are many cases where the answer is somehow exceptional, as with overflow or rounding. The machine is therefore only able to calculate within a limited domain (because unlike ideal Turing Machines, it has limited memory to work with). Whether the answers are "correct" is something the computer itself can never know. It requires an outside observer to compare the results to mathematical identities. (Yes, the outside observer could be another computer.)QuoteMost computer models of "cognition" are also based on wide association nets, and have been since the beginning of the field. Newell and Simon's Logic Theorist (1956) operated on maps of expressions in propositional calculus. Since computers are universal (Church-Turing Thesis) they can work on associations, and their performance on this task is measurable against humans. Logic Theorist discovered a proof of one of the theorems in thePrincipia Mathematicathat was shorter than the one found by Whitehead & Russell.

author: Melt-O-Tronic
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2021, 04:15:20 pm
content: It's fun to watch silly discussions about silly questions.Helius, if we accept your defense of the OP's question, then what is the answer?

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 11, 2021, 09:22:06 pm
content: Quote from: Melt-O-Tronic on February 11, 2021, 04:15:20 pmSometimes the silly questions can be interesting and produce insights.QuoteI already gavemyanswer inReply #11. Brains are simplyvery, very, very badat the tasks that we designed computers to perform. Well, what about other kinds of tasks? There are other kinds of metrics.Thousands of Logical Inferences Per Second (KLIPS) is a metric of how many (single-step) inferences a machine can make in a second. In the 1980s the fastest computers could hit about 100 KLIPS. Today there are systems capable of 200,000 KLIPS.How many KLIPS is the brain capable of? That is a much harder question, but since inference is the neuron's function, and there are billions of neurons with trillions of synapses, around a million KLIPS seems like a conservative estimate. Are all inferences created equal? Clearly not, and we lack a good way to compare inferences in computers to those in brains. Neural network systems are trained using a method called "back-propagation" which is biologically impossible, so there is a lot we do not know.

author: ejeffrey
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 12, 2021, 04:09:29 am
content: Quote from: Beamin on February 06, 2021, 01:48:29 amI can do about 1 but not with very high precision.You will find "serious" people estimating numbers over many orders of magnitude but it is mostly nonsense. We basically don't know enough about how the brain works to even know how to quantify it's computing ability. A lot of these are based on what it would take to *simulate* what we know about neurons but that is like figuring out how much computing power you need to run aSPICE model of every transistor in a CPU and then calling that the processing power of the CPU.

author: hans
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 12, 2021, 10:30:05 am
content: Let's continue the useless discussion. Although.. I mostly agree.Quote from: helius on February 10, 2021, 10:13:08 pmI agree with your statement. I missed the word 'different measures' there. My badQuoteI agree. Someone with dyscalculia will likely not succeed in a PhD in math. Hats off to anyone that can pull it of nonetheless (likely won't happen). They will likely struggle to do basic budgeting and find out what to pay for groceries.But that does not mean their IQ number is absolutely low (as in disabling), even though relatively we can find correlations for various conditions. For that, I think that truth and courage is not the right word; let's say we should be more realistic. We tell our children they should chase their dreams and can be anything; but a doctor-student that faints when it sees blood, will likely not progress very far.QuoteI was exaggerating "perfect" there.However, I do think that people on the autistic or schizophrenic spectrum will tend to disagree that our information processing is universal. Many brilliant mathematicians or scientists have suffered from such a condition.QuoteI agree, I am not an expert. I was not out to give a formal definition. All I wanted to say that in general that those factors are quite important yet general to express work or academic performance. However, I was probably misled by my own memory: I do recall that the various factors have strong correlations. If you do well in 1 area, you will likely do well in other areas.QuoteOkay; let me rephrase. All the things we create are associations. The things we find are mappings of how nature works with our associations, eventually converging to axioms of math that are universally true. We expect to have the same math axioms as the aliens that we find (or they find us). But the way we write numbers, use the radix-10 convention, ASCII, etc. will likely be completely different.However, I think that we humans only deal with implementation-facing details in our head. Most of us will not computationally use the axioms of math in our head. That's what I meant by that most of us do computations by associations. We have learned mostly created implementation details; most of us stay within a radix-10 number system (a domain) in daily life. But who knows; maybe a radix-12 or radix-8 system would have worked way better? But does that make an individualmore intelligentif it can do radix-8 computations in real-time? I doubt it, however, I do not have any argument to back it up.QuoteI agree. Most models look like trained associations.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 12, 2021, 11:47:49 pm
content: Quote from: hans on February 12, 2021, 10:30:05 amIndeed. Babylonians used base 60 (convenient for fractions as it has many divisors). Even cultures with the same radix and numerals can use different conventions for numbers (which are conceptualized with different mental associations). Indians use thelakhandcrorewhich look strange to other people. And then there are the French:QuoteRadix 12 is perhaps more useful for finger-counting since it can count up to 144 fairly easily (some other systems can count higher but are more cumbersome). There are two ways to look at this: does having certain mental tools enable you think with greater power? That seems to be true: a familiarity with logic and statistics, for example, does enable an individual to parse complex facts with more speed and accuracy. After all, that is the value of education. On the other hand, if we are speaking of "native intellectual ability" or "congenital intelligence" then such cultural resources would not be allowed, but that is not a very useful concept anyway. Nobody cares that the wolf-child was born with a perfect brain if she cannot understand any complex ideas. Genetics explains the greater abilities of some individuals but the whole civilization is a precondition for their achievements.Education is more than raw associations, though. Really what we use are layers of rules (that are associations) but that have the ability to check one another and produce self-consistent pictures. That's why KLIPS is defined as "logical inferences" and not just "table lookups".Computers can calculate with associations, too: see theIBM 1620, which had no arithmetic unit. It depended on table lookups to add or multiply.

author: BitsnBytes
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2021, 11:58:21 am
content: QuoteI think the time taken by nerve signals would be the quantitative representation of brain speed.Regards

author: -jeffB
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2021, 03:23:49 pm
content: Quote from: helius on February 12, 2021, 11:47:49 pmCould... could you post a picture of your hands? Just want to compare something.

author: MK14
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2021, 03:30:48 pm
content: Quote from: -jeffB on February 13, 2021, 03:23:49 pmHave a careful look at your hand, just the fingers, ignore the thumb.Notice each third of a finger, has a small line divider and joint.Count them up, how many have you got ?4 fingers x 3 sub-sections = 12 ?

author: DrG
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2021, 03:55:29 pm
content: Quote from: MK14 on February 13, 2021, 03:30:48 pm*dayam* I be countin me bones all wrong!This is why I prefer finger binaryhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_binaryDon't be offended, yes there is that "method" you mentioned as well as many othershttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-counting#AsiaWhen not using finger binary, I also use whole body counting - only a portion shown here

author: CatalinaWOW
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2021, 05:40:43 pm
content: Quote from: BitsnBytes on February 13, 2021, 11:58:21 amTrying to reduce computer or brain speeds to a single number is going to lead to confusion and arguments.Nerve speed or other measures can give a rough idea of clocking rate, or minimum response time or something like that. But these measures give answers in the five to ten Hertz range. If that were the whole answer no one would be bothered by screen or fluorescent light flicker in the 20-30 Hz range. So some processes operate somewhat faster and some are slower.But clock rate isn't the be all, end all answer for speed, for either computers or people. Supercomputers don't achieve their multi-Teraflop rates through multi-teraflop clock rates, they are also "massively" parallel. I put the "massively" in quotes. The term is widely used in describing supercomputers. But brains are many orders of magnitude more parallel than supercomputers.It would be nice to compare brain and computer capabilities for many reasons. One of the most compelling is to estimate when they might take over from us. But we really don't even have the tools yet to properly ask the question, let alone find the answers.

author: james_s
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2021, 06:09:54 pm
content: I don't think clock speed is really a useful concept when discussing the brain. It is not a digital computer, it is not synchronous, it has no clock, it takes time for chemical and electrical signals to travel around but that's more of a propagation and response time than a clock. Analog computers didn't have a clock either.

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 13, 2021, 10:30:33 pm
content: The brain is more synchronous than you might expect. Instead of a clock tree it uses timed feedback loops, but that still keeps all the parts synchronized. Of course, the type of synchronization is not the D-flipflop kind where you sample an input at a precise time. It is more a matter of having a billion voltage-to-frequency converters that pull each other into quasistable regimes.

author: cgroen
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 14, 2021, 10:10:26 am
content: Quote from: Beamin on February 10, 2021, 01:45:09 amI think you are very correct...

author: NiHaoMike
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 14, 2021, 01:51:26 pm
content: Quote from: helius on February 13, 2021, 10:30:33 pmSurprisingly similar to the time when someone tried to see if evolution could build a useful circuit on a FPGA.http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=73Quote from: Beamin on February 10, 2021, 01:45:09 amThe software side must be very impressive (relatively speaking) to do what it can with so little. Kind of like the Amigas that were known for being so capable with comparatively little hardware.