Liberties taken with rounding.
Number of neurons in a human brain: 100 billion. 10^11. 2^36.
Number of connections (edges) among those neurons: 100 trillion, 10^14, 2^46
Storage needed to represent 100 trillion pointers, assuming a 12-bit address (8 isn't enough): ~ 760 tebibits, 100 tebibytes.
Memory of an average consumer workstation, for comparison: 4GB, 2^32 bytes
Memory in JUGENE: 144 terabytes
Memory in Jaguar (XT5): 300 terabytes
Expected memory in Sequoia: 1.6 petabytes
Just sayin'.
Comments
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Carl
#25714, 2009-07-28T23:04:00Z
Suppose one were to want to store all of the information in the brain including chemical concentrations and configurations of individual molecules. (After all, we don't know how important the sub-neuron level hardware is to the functioning of the brain. Hell, we don't even know what memories are yet.) Now, this could not be done with current hard drives, but what about future hard drives? Suppose we had it so that each atom in a hard drive stored not just one bit, but the whole array of quantum numbers associated with it. Further suppose that we can arrange the atoms inside this hard drive in different ways to reflect different configurations.
Supposing all of this, how large would a device need to be in order to make an accurate copy of the data in a human brain?
By my calculations, it would have to be about the size of a human brain.
:-D
Plus you would need a lot of overhead to control it, so actually, it would probably always have to be even bigger than a human brain. Which means we'd be better off using the real thing. After all, we've already got 6 billion lying around!
Alec Henriksen
#26750, 2009-08-10T18:50:43Z
Haha, yes, we have a long way to go. ;)
Dr. J. Vern Hälk
#28274, 2009-09-03T21:41:02Z
Your neurological picture is too simple. A neuron is capable of more than "connections" it would be more accurate to compare a single neuron to a simple computer in itself which processes the input it gets and doesn't just relay it or recall a state. Furthermore it's reconfigurable. Each simple processor connected to other processors by a system supports multiple simultaneous states and directions of communication and in itself can retain a small amount of information.
It's often said that that to replicate the human brain would take a computer the size of texas and three stories tall. However that figure has been repeated for the last 30 years. The computers have gotten faster, however we've discovered that the brain is far more complex than we imagined, even last year.
Any time you hear anyone saying given XYZ resources we could make a brain assume this person isn't up to date on the latest neuroscience.