Re: How To Live In A Simulation

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Mar 18 2001 - 12:13:59 MST


"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> According to Gwen Jacobs at a recent NSF meeting on terrascale computing,
> it would require 1 month of Petaflops computing power to simulate 1
> second of brain time (now I don't believe for correct -- I think it is
> much worse (i.e. computing requirements are greater) if you are doing
> and atomic or quantum scale simulation, but thats another discussion)..

1000 exaflops for a human brain?! 1e21 ops/sec? Where does she get that
figure from? Or is it a calculation for simulating the diffusion of
individual neurotransmitters on a particle-based level?

> An interesting tidbit falls out of this in that it suggests you can't
> run a whole brain simulation on a Drexlerian rod-logic 1 cm^3 nanocomputer
> in real-time. You would have to slow it down by about a factor of a
> billion to run it in the NC (or run a tightly linked net of NCs).

Hm? According to _Nanosystems_, a rod logic runs at 1e21 ops/sec - one
month of petaflops, or just about.

I don't know how you get from 1 month of petaflops to 1e30 ops/sec for a
human brain. 31 million secs/year, right?

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



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