Definitely amazing.  Yet HP and MIT's work in nanotech threatens to eclipse
these speeds.  The human mind is doing something different, seemingly
demonstrating an ability to dynamically "rewire" itself creating a plethora
of parallel "processors" and then wading through the results (again in
parallel.)  This explains our ability to entertain conflicting points of
view at the same time and make a decision.

Frank Gribbin


On Tue, 28 Aug 2001 09:55:49 EDT, Wirt Atmar <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

>Who would have thunk it? This is an enormous amount of power in a
serialized
>processor. Somebody is going to have to think up some applications that
can
>really take advantage of these extraordinary speeds. Clock timings are now
>well under half a nanosecond.
>
>Perhaps this last sentence is the greatest indicator of how differently
>implemented animal neuronal informational processing is from what we're
doing
>in computers. PCs are now running almost precisely one million times
faster
>than the time it takes for a single neuron to fire, and yet we struggle to
>make a PC understand speech, or even more simply produce high-quality
speech.
>We clearly don't understand the natural algorithms yet or the depth of
their
>complexities.
>
>Wirt Atmar
>

* To join/leave the list, search archives, change list settings, *
* etc., please visit http://raven.utc.edu/archives/hp3000-l.html *