[Prodigal Son]

35.9 trillion calculations a second with

This is 35 Tera FLOPS no? Anybody know? The last I heard they were only at 2 Tera FLOPS. Does anybody know how much processing power the human brain has? I was under the impression that it was also measure in Tera FLOPS- it makes me wonder how far away they are.

[jlogajan]

FLOPS is floating point operations per second. I'm pretty sure the human brain doesn't do floating point calculations. :-)

[general_re]

I honestly don't know of any meaningful way to compare the performance of the human mind to that of a computer's. Each excels at things the other finds virtually impossible. The very best face-recognition systems will typically fail to recognize you somewhere 10-20% of the time, unless the conditions are basically staged - by contrast, when was the last time you really literally didn't recognize someone familiar to you? OTOH, a computer can calculate pi to an absurd number of digits while you're still looking for pencil and paper.

Computers can handily beat all but the top one or two players in the world at chess - chess lends itself well to mathematical analysis, which is the computer's strong suit. The Japanese game of "Go" does not, however - even a novice Go player can generally easily beat the very best Go-playing computer.

We do some things well that computers don't, like pattern recognition, and computers do some things well that we don't, like mathematical analysis. That's about the only accurate comparison I think anyone can really make ;)