Why are brains so much better at learning/improvising than computers?
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It’s all about specificity vs. generalisation. Computers process all information as numbers and therefore base their memory and “thinking” on very rigid mathematical algorithms. This means that they are able to process a lot of information very quickly, and recall that information accurately, but it isn’t good at making connections because it is so precise that either two things are the same or their not the same.
The human brain is nothing like a computer. It processes a different information from your different senses and instead of thinking in maths it is based on concepts. This is a much less precise, but much more flexible system. A computer doesn’t know what a cat is in general. It can know that these specific things are cats and will recall exactly how that specific cat looked. Your brain, however, focuses on the broad strokes so it can take the characteristics it has seen in the different things called cat and tell whether something new it sees is a cat or not, but it will never be able to perfectly recall how a specific cat looked.
The latest advances in AI, neural networks, is actually trying to mimic how the human brain works.
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