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From: abc@brl-smoke.ARPA (Brint Cooper )
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: Computational ability of houseflies
Message-ID: <564@brl-smoke.ARPA>
Date: Mon, 5-May-86 21:43:15 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-smok.564
Posted: Mon May  5 21:43:15 1986
Date-Received: Thu, 8-May-86 07:11:41 EDT
References: <3080@ncsu.UUCP> <2121@peora.UUCP>
Reply-To: abc@brl-smoke.UUCP (Brint Cooper (SECAD/CSMB) <abc>)
Organization: Ballistic Research Lab (BRL)
Lines: 38

In article <2121@peora.UUCP> jer@peora.UUCP (J. Eric Roskos) writes:
>>
>> Does any hardware currently exist that matches the real-time computational
>> ability of a housefly?
>
>Funny you should ask this... it's a very interesting subject.
>
>The thing is, the brain doesn't seem to do computing the way current-day
>machines do; in particular, it seems to contradict a lot of the
>logic-based approaches to artificial intelligence.  Think about how people
>do arithmetic operations, for example... they do it by table lookup!  Of
>course, they also follow algorithms (add this column of 1-digit numbers,
>put the "carry" on top of the next column, etc.), but the basic arithmetic
>operations don't work the way they do in computers; at some early time
>they memorized "two times two is four; three times two is six," etc., and
>now recall these discrete facts whenever they do arithmetic.
>
>Recent research seems to suggest that in general a lot of human
>"computation" also works this way, with the interesting enhancement that,
>if you think of it in terms of a table, table entries tend to "attract"
>nearby guesses, so that from an approximation you get pulled into the
>memorized answer.

This is a fascinating idea.  A variant of it may be to consider that the
discrete facts which we as children memorized form the 'primitives' of
our CPU in a manner analogous to the primitive operations (add, carry,
store, test, set) in digital computer hardware.  Obviously, if the
primitives are at a 'higher level,' we can afford for them to take
longer if they are the proper set for solving our more complex problems.

Perhaps computer designers need to consider more imaginatively just what
their hardware primitives should do.

-- 
Brint Cooper

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