eli5: Just how powerful is the Human brain, especially compared to a computer?
In: Biology
“Power” isn’t necessarily the right term to compare. It’s different. The human brain is estimated to have an information storage capacity of a couple of petabytes, which far outpaces the capacity of most electronic storage devices we have at this time. However, our brains process individual tasks at a fraction of the speed of modern computers.
One big difference between the human brain and current computers/computer programs (other than the obvious organic vs. Inorganic differences) is that the animal brains are generalist processing systems. Meaning they are able to information about a thing, and adapt and use it to apply, learn about, and process a task that has nothing to do with the original information. We are surrounded by specialist AI, but those are bound by the confines, rules, and definitions of their programmed tasks, and don’t yet have the processing capability to find a way to essentially make a square peg fit into a round hole without operator assistance. Once quantum computing becomes readily available, though, I can see that limit to AI changing rapidly.
It’s very difficult to compare the two, because they operate in very different ways.
A computer operates very linearly- executing calculations in ones and zeroes using electric impulses. Performance is generally measured by how fast it can do those calculations and how many it can do at a time. It can perform extremely complex calculations the human brain might struggle to do.
Functionally, ths brain is infinitely more complex, an organic computer that processes unimaginable quantities of data in parallel fashion, mostly autonomously. Rather than ones and zeroes, its works in the language of neurotransmitters and synaptic connections- the latter of which there are more of in your brain than there are stars in the universe.
One could argue the brain is more powerful than any computer (thus far) and they’d be right- as long as you define “powerful” correctly.
It really depends on how you compare the two.
Computers kick our ass at things that involve doing logic within a finite time limit. That is: if there is a definable input and output and goal, and someone writes a formal algorithm that tells a computer how to solve that problem, it will solve the problem faster than a human could hope to unless it’s just a *really* bad computer.
We kick computers’ asses at things like abstractly grouping things using heuristics; the big challenges in computing right now tend to focus around AI and how to make computers “learn”, and that’s proven to be a pretty tricky problem. For instance: if I show pretty much any single person a picture and ask them if it’s a bird, they’ll be able to tell me if they’re above the age of, say, 5.
But if I ask that same task of a computer, it won’t know. The best that it can currently do is to first sit down with a bunch of humans, showing them a bunch of pictures that are “training” and having the humans tell them if they are or aren’t pictures of birds, and using some fancy math to decide how likely it is that an unknown picture matches the category “bird”.
This works decently well, but it also causes things like a computer learning algorithm thinking that a picture of big fluffy clouds over a green field is a picture of a bunch of sheep on a ranch.
Basically, if you can reduce it to math, computers should (theoretically) be able to solve it faster than humans once we know there’s a solution, but we’re generally better at doing the lateral thinking required to see if the problem seems like it should be solvable.
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