[Beowulf] IBM's Watson on Jeopardy tonight

[ariel sabiguero yawelak]

I believe that it is because, on the one hand, we don't accept fuzzy 
results, and on the other hand, we don't know how to train the millions 
of ANNs required to mimic a mammal's brain.
The way in which biology deals with failures, faults and defects is far 
beyond our full comprehension. How to program a brain? and similar 
questions are beyond our grasp too, yet, we re-program ourselves day 
after day intuitively.

In some way, the speed at which multicores are evolving (more and 
simpler cores instead of a single, yet powerful one) indicates that 
parallel processing is the way to go -I think I read it somewhere in 
this list-. Maybe the answer that the evolution found for carbon-based 
processing is different than the one for future silicon-based life forms 
(or at least, intelligent processing). A dead company used to say "the 
computer is the network", and for our brains it seems so. Will it be 
true for really-massive processors? Will they shrink until they only sum 
and bias inputs without any programing inside? Will we discuss 
multi-million-core-SMP? If so, I doubt that it will be single-bus-based 
solution.

I'm not sure I'll live until we find an answer, but is a nice long term 
research topic....

ariel

El 16/02/11 12:29, "C. Bergström" escribió:
> Lux, Jim (337C) wrote:
>> I think it will be a while before a machine has the wide span of capabilities of a human (particularly in terms of the ability to manipulate the surroundings), and, as someone pointed out the energy consumption is quite different (as is the underlying computational rate... lots of fairly slow neurons with lots of parallelism vs relatively few really fast transistors)
>>
> Doesn't this then raise the question of why we aren't modeling computers
> and programming models after the brain? ;)
>
>
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