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From: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Building a brain
Keywords: hardware brain
Message-ID: <10175@venera.isi.edu>
Date: 17 Oct 89 20:43:55 GMT
References: <14079@well.UUCP>
Sender: news@venera.isi.edu
Reply-To: smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu.UUCP (Stephen Smoliar)
Distribution: comp
Organization: USC-Information Sciences Institute
Lines: 36

In article <14079@well.UUCP> nagle@well.UUCP (John Nagle) writes:
>
>       Hans Moravec, in Mind Children, rates human brains at about 10^6 MIPS
>and 10^15 bits of storage.  
>
>       I have before me an ad for a single VMEbus board mounting eight 
>M88200 processors running at 33MHz.  The manufacturer (Tadpole Technology)
>claims 220 MIPS for this unit.
>
>       So, to get the raw CPU power of a brain, we need about 5000 boards,
>or 227 standard VME cages, or 76 racks, or about 150 linear feet of cabinetry.
>
>       I've worked in mainframe installations bigger than that.
>
>       If we knew how to solve the architecture problems, we could build
>the hardware.  
>
There is one small difficulty which was observed by David Waltz in his
contribution to the DAEDALUS issue on artificial intelligence, "The Prospects
for Building Truly Intelligent Machines."  Even if you DO get the architecture
right (and other readers of this bulletin board have been skeptical about
that), you may face the prospect that "educating" your device may take
something on the order of ten or twenty years.  After all, if you duplicate
human hardware, you should not be surprised if you get human performance.

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"For every human problem, there is a neat, plain solution--and it is always
wrong."--H. L. Mencken