On Sat, Jun 16, 2012 at 8:00 AM, Jacob G Podipara <podi...@gmail.com> wrote:
> The biological equivalent our brain has not had a model upgrade for > billions of years. It processes > inputs of greater complexity, greater detail than at child stage without > upgrades. The process is called `learning`. Also the brain grows and constantly upgrades itself with millions of new neural networks over it's life. In fact your brain is upgrading itself right now when it is consuming the information you are reading now. I know I am nitpicking and you used it in a figure of speech, but just to set the record straight - we are not a billion years old. The earliest humanoids are only 2.5 million years old. Modern humans (homo sapiens) are only 0.1 million years old! > Rather than > hardware we probabaly need less intensive software or require applications > consuming less. > This is an interesting point. It is a chicken-or-egg kind of a problem. But there are some limitations. We can trivialize the issue by saying that we wrote incredibly good code (remember the gpcar, digger, prince of persia?) which used to run on old 386 machines with monochrome displays. They had music playing out of the PC's speaker which could be controlled only in the notes. And this in a non multitasking dumb OS. But I I have also seen AutoCAD rendering the famous Columbia space shuttle (came as a example file) in an 80286 machine with no math co processor. It used to take 5 minutes to show the wire frame. The same file ships even now I think. This file took 3 seconds to render in a Pentium machine. No matter how good the software programmer is, they can't write code to render the space shuttle 3d image in a 80286 machine in 3 seconds. There are some limitations to which software can be written better. It is finally limited by clock cycle speed, RAM etc. But there is no end to human ingenuity. There is a famous Tamil proverb "Vallavanukku Pullum Ayudham" meaning "Even a blade of Grass can become a weapon in the hands of a truly capable person". The Voyager space probes which are on the edge of the solar system, nearing interstellar space run with processor much less capable than the processor in the cheapest cell phone you can buy. They work with 8000 bytes of RAM. With this, the human `spirit` in them was capable of bringing voyager 2 on a grand tour of the planets keeping it's date with each planet and is currently `on course` at nearly 17 billion Km from home. Regards, Arun http://wondroussky.blogspot.in/ "கற்றது கைமண் அளவு, கல்லாதது உலகளவு" - ஔவையார் Known is a drop, Unknown is an ocean _______________________________________________ ILUGC Mailing List: http://www.ae.iitm.ac.in/mailman/listinfo/ilugc
