Matt Mahoney wrote:
--- Richard Loosemore <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Matt Mahoney wrote:
I was referring to Landauer's estimate of long term memory learning rate
of
about 2 bits per second. http://www.merkle.com/humanMemory.html
This does not include procedural memory, things like visual perception and
knowing how to walk. So 10^-6 bits is low. But how do we measure such
things?
I think my general point is that "bits per second" or "bits per synapse"
is a valid measure if you care about something like an electrical signal
line, but is just simply an incoherent way to talk about the memory
capacity of the human brain.
Saying "0.000001 bits per synapse" is no better than opening and closing
one's mouth without saying anything.
"Bits" is a perfectly sensible measure of information. Memory can be measured
using human recall tests, just as Shannon used human prediction tests to
estimate the information capacity of natural language text. The question is
important to anyone who needs to allocate a hardware budget for an AI design.
If I take possession of a brand new computer with 1 terabyte hard-drive
memory capacity, and then I happen to use it to store nothing but the
(say) 1 gigabyte software it came with, your conclusion would be that
each memory cell in the computer has a capacity of 0.001 bits.
This is a meaningless number because *how* the storage is actually being
used is not a sensible measure of its capacity.
So, knowing that humans actually recall X amount of bits in the Shannon
sense does not tell you how many "bits per synapse" are stored in the
brain, it just tells you .... that humans recall X amount of bits in the
Shannon sense, that is all.
And, yes Matt, I waste far too much time trying to explain the nonsense
in your comments. I really should not bother.
Bye
Richard Loosemore
-------------------------------------------
singularity
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