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From: rlh@mit-eddie.UUCP (Roger L. Hale)
Newsgroups: net.ai
Subject: Re: Parallelism and Conciousness
Message-ID: <885@mit-eddie.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 1-Nov-83 19:56:19 EST
Article-I.D.: mit-eddi.885
Posted: Tue Nov  1 19:56:19 1983
Date-Received: Sun, 6-Nov-83 05:01:37 EST
References: <3498@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Organization: MIT, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 36

at requirement is based on the maximum speed of
    a processing unit that we can currently build.  If you mean 'at the
    exact same time', then I defy you to show me a case where this is
    necessary.

    The statement "No algorithm is inherently parallel", just means that
    the algorithm itself (as opposed to the engineering of putting it
    into practice) does not necessarily have to be done in parallel.
    Any parallel algorithm that you give me, I can write a sequential
    algorithm that does the same thing.

Consider the retina, and its processing algorithm.  It is certainly
true that once the raw information has been collected and in some way
band-limited, it can be processed in either fashion; but one part of
the algorithm must necessarily be implemented in parallel.  To get
the photon efficiencies that are needed for dark-adapted vision
(part of the specifications for the algorithm) one must have some
continuous, distributed attention to the light field.  If I match
the spatial and temporal resolution of the retina, call it several thousand
by several thousand by some milliseconds, by sequentially scanning with
a single receptor, I can only catch one in several-squared million
photons, not the order of one in ten that our own retina achieves.