Is strong AI a function of storage capacity or speed?
Storage capacity.
The brain is relatively slow. Ignoring microtubules, we're just dumb chemical reactions. But we are a lot of dumb chemical reactions. A human brain is ~ 100 billion neurons with each neuron having 100 to 7000 connections to other neurons.
So, just estimating here, 100 giganeurons * 1000 connections = 100 trillion neuron connections.
To simulate that, we use matrices of floats for each connection. So 100 trillion 4 byte floats = 400 terabytes of memory (with lots of hand-wavy assumptions). The fanciest GPUs we have today top out around 3 GB of memory (but they have 1k great run-in-lockstep cores) and the largest whole non-proprietary system I've seen tops out at 1 TB of local RAM: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/quotes/212240?confirmation=1...
We can simulate parts (vision and hearing have advanced on neural networks in the past 5 years), but higher level cognition/motivation is still an unknown quantity.
Storage capacity.
The brain is relatively slow. Ignoring microtubules, we're just dumb chemical reactions. But we are a lot of dumb chemical reactions. A human brain is ~ 100 billion neurons with each neuron having 100 to 7000 connections to other neurons.
So, just estimating here, 100 giganeurons * 1000 connections = 100 trillion neuron connections.
To simulate that, we use matrices of floats for each connection. So 100 trillion 4 byte floats = 400 terabytes of memory (with lots of hand-wavy assumptions). The fanciest GPUs we have today top out around 3 GB of memory (but they have 1k great run-in-lockstep cores) and the largest whole non-proprietary system I've seen tops out at 1 TB of local RAM: http://www.siliconmechanics.com/quotes/212240?confirmation=1...
We can simulate parts (vision and hearing have advanced on neural networks in the past 5 years), but higher level cognition/motivation is still an unknown quantity.