Re: BLUE GENE and confusion about flops and tops and whistles

From: Russell Wallace (russell.wallace@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Apr 04 2006 - 14:22:25 MDT


On 4/4/06, Philip Goetz <philgoetz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Yes - what do you mean "it will turn out somewhat higher once you take
> in all the nuances, it always does"? I don't understand that
> statement at all. It seems to me that you can't say "it always does"
> when there is only one phenomenon, not a class of them, under study.
>

What I mean is that I was looking at the 200 Hz figure and deciding whether
to call it 10^2 or 10^3 for the sake of an order of magnitude estimate, and
remembering that whenever we investigate the complexity of some aspect of
the brain or biology in general, 99% of the time it turns out higher rather
than lower than we thought (and serious attempts to simulate biological
neurons rather than artificial "neural nets" last I heard were using very
large amounts of computing power, more than synapse count * 200 Hz, though I
forget why) so 10^3 struck me as more plausible.



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