Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!clyde!bellcore!rutgers!aramis.rutgers.edu!klaatu.rutgers.edu!josh
From: josh@klaatu.rutgers.edu (J Storrs Hall)
Newsgroups: comp.ai
Subject: Re: Sound and complete definitions of intelligence.
Message-ID: 
Date: 8 Dec 88 23:59:41 GMT
References:  <2768@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu>
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 50

I wrote:
" Moravec estimates 10 teraops/10 terawords to be human-equivalent
" computational power. ...

Greg, lee@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu replied:

    Surely such estimates are frivolous.

They are not.  Let me reccomend to you not only Hans' published
work but Sejnowski in AAAI-88 and Merkle in AIAA Computers in
Aerospace 87.  It is obviously of critical importance to AI to 
have some understanding of the size of the problem it is trying
to solve, relative to the tool they are trying to use.

Surely the estimates are imprecise--I haven't seen even one that
claimed to be better than order-of-magnitude-- but estimates I have
read from widely varying sources fall into the 10e12 - 10e15 range
with surprising consistency.

You should not so blithely dismiss an area where serious, informed 
estimation dates back to von Neumann ("The Computer and the Brain").

    We don't know what or how humans
    compute in at least one crucial area, language, except functionally by
    the gross results we can observe.

So what?  The parts we do know about, the retina for example, give
us some guidelines for estimating an upper bound for whatever
computation is being done.  And we can theorize and conjecture.
Our estimates may be wrong, but they are not frivolous.

    Could you estimate the computational
    resources consumed by an unknown program executing under an unknown
    operating system given some small samples of its input and output
    and fragmentary information about the device in use?  Not feasible,
    without (re)constructing the program, at least, which we haven't
    yet managed to do for humans.

Again, let me start vivisecting the computer with appropriate test
instruments and I can begin to give you some believable upper and
lower bounds.

...Mind you, this is not to say that there aren't significantly better
ways the brain could be doing some of the things it does.  Consider
what a Cray could do to all those long division problems you slaved
over in grade school.  And the existance of "idiot savant" human
calculators proves that there are significantly faster ways that
even the brain can do some things like that.

--JoSH