Skip to main content

Mr. Mickey vs Mr. Big Blue Gene

Wow! I absolutely adore this. Here comes my saviour, after a day when Bloomberg scared wits out of me saying computers will start trading.

In the contest between a super computer and a mouse, Mr. Stuart Little wins. A super computer cant beat a mouse! Huraah! Three cheers to Mr. Mickey!

Contestant Vitals:

In the blue corner to the right - Mr. Blue Gene - The SUPER computer

IBM's BlueGene/L supercomputer contains 4,096 processors, each with 256MB of RAM. It crunches out 360 trillion floating point operations per second. That is Trillions dudes.

In the yellow corner to the left - Mr. Mouse Cheeselover - The CUTE little fella

The mouse cortex has roughly 8million neurons and 8,000 synapses per neuron, firing rate of 1Hz, the entire memory must be refreshed every second, each neuron must be updated at every simulation time step, and each neuron communicates to each of its targets at least once a second.

Result: Mr Mickey knocked out the Big Blue in 10secs flat.

Details: Even this huge processing effort (of computer) still only managed to run at a speed 10 times slower than real time, and only for 10 seconds - the equivalent of one second of mouse-thought.

Lest I be challenged next, the researchers say I have 100Billion neurons. Very surprising, my mom says it is basically empty.

:) Falkor


PS: The modelling is basically well.. just a model. All the neurons dont fire at the same time, as it is assumed here, that would be a travesty of inefficeint engineering and prodigious waste of energy. There are many more factors affecting the 'thought process'. Mr. Mickey cannot beat Mr. Blue at chess for example, unless of course he chews off the cables :))
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cognitive rules of business presentations

In his recent book, Clear and to the Point, Kosslyn explained that the four rules of PowerPoint are: The Goldilocks Rule, The Rudolph Rule, The Rule of Four, and the Birds of a Feather Rule. Here's how they work. The Goldilocks Rule refers to presenting the "just right" amount of data. Never include more information than your audience needs in a visual image. As an example, Kosslyn showed two graphs of real estate prices over time. One included ten different numbers, one for each year. The other included two numbers: a peak price, and the current price. For the purposes of a presentation about today's prices relative to peak price, those numbers were the only ones necessary. The Rudolph Rule refers to simple ways you can make information stand out and guide your audience to important details -- the way Rudolph the reindeer's red nose stood out from the other reindeers' and led them. If you're presenting a piece of relevant data in a list, why not mak...
Post a Comment
Read more

Monetary inflation, Spiritual devaluation

Its been sometime I have been trying to make some special people understand the evils of inflation. Inflation is an abstract subject most of us dont know about, let alone understand the technicalities amidst jargons. I have in my previous post have briefly touched the social part of inflation but never in a concentrated way. I understand what my friends mean when they say "tell me in layman’s language." It is not a heartening sign, that they avoid technicalities. But it could well be that knowing where they stand, their role and understanding the social changes in the light of inflation may motivate them to understand the term "inflation." This is just to highlight the brief points. First and the foremost, is there any link between inflation numbers and society. Yes. The relation is same as the relation between society and money. What is money? Money is an easy means of exchange. If I am selling my horses to a pig-farmer and I am not interested in taking pigs in ret...
2 comments
Read more

Unprecedented External Demand Shock Underway

India’s export growth averaged 24.8% over the last three years, driven by strong global growth. However, over the last three months, export growth has decelerated sharply. While until recently the strong demand from emerging markets including Latin America, Emerging Europe, the Middle East and Africa ensured that export growth remained healthy, over the last three months disruptions in the macro environment of these economies have been evident. Apart from weakening demand, exports have also been affected by the lack of availability of foreign trade credit and inventory liquidation. India’s exports declined by 12.1%Y in October 2008 compared with 10.4% in September and 26.9% in August. While we expect some improvement in the second half of 2009, exports are likely to be unusually weak over the next six months. We now expect exports to decline by 5.3%Y in 2009 compared with 12.7% in 2008 (estimated) and 23.1% in 2007 Excerpt source
Post a Comment
Read more