eli5: Just how powerful is the Human brain, especially compared to a computer?
In: Biology
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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