About false posts in the VC or how many operations per second the human brain performs
To write this article, I was prompted by the post of one of the popular VKontakte publics, which literally had the following: “The human brain is able to perform 1016 operations per second. This means that its power is still higher than the power of any existing computer today. " I figured out who is cooler, the brain, or the computer.
First, let's look at what operations per second are, what is the power of your desktop computer, and what is the power of the super-megapap computer on the planet.
To measure the computing power of computers, a unit of measurement is used, called flops (flops, flop / s). Flops shows how many floating-point operations a computer performs in one second. In addition, to measure computing power, a concept such as a clock frequency is used. The processor clock frequency indicates how many basic operations the processor performs per second, and is measured in hertz. The main operation performed by the processor may include many operations with a floating point, so the measurement results in flops and hertz differ. If you find the “My Computer” icon on your desktop, right-click on it, open the properties in the drop-down menu, then the truth will open for you. Find the “System” header in the window that will open, and there, in front of the word “processor”, the clock frequency of your processor will be indicated. Most likely it will look like this: “2.10 GHz”. The number may vary slightly. So, 1 GHz is 1,000,000,000 hertz, or one billion operations per second. From this it follows that at a clock frequency of 2.10 gigahertz, the percent performs 2100000000 operations per second. This is certainly more than 1016. When measured in flops, the number will increase several times.
Go ahead. Titan's supercomputer from Cray inc. has an estimated computing power of 20 petaflops. 1 petaflops equals 10 ^ 15 flops. You can calculate for yourself what the number will turn out and how many zeros it has. As one poet said: “Well this is a bang ...”
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Now about the brain. It's not as simple as with computers. At the present stage of development of neuroscience, it is quite difficult to calculate the computational power of the brain, and compare it with a computer. However, it is clear that we cannot perform the same operations that our laptop performs at the same speed and in the same volumes. Obviously, the computer is more powerful, yes? And no.
Let's take a closer look at how it works.
The brain is a biological neural network. The neural network consists of neurons, (in the case of the brain, these are brain cells), each of which is connected to other neurons. The place of communication of neurons is called a synapse. A chemical or electrical impulse is transmitted from one neuron through the synapse to another neuron. The number of neurons in the human brain is approximately equal to 100 billion (one hundred billion). Data from different sources differ slightly, but the overall picture is similar. Each of these neurons has from 7,000 to 10,000 synapses. On average, 10 pulses per second pass through one synapse, i.e. we have a clock frequency of 10 hertz per synoptic connection. And now entertaining mathematics: we multiply 100000000000 neurons by 10,000 of their synoptic connections and multiply all this by 10 hertz. We get a number with sixteen zeros after one, otherwise 10 ^ 16. So, where did the mysterious number 1016 come from. Apparently it just transformed in the course of an endless repost from public to public. And it turns out that our brain has more processing power than the Titan supercomputer. Ultimately, the author of a post about 1016 operations per second was right.
First, let's look at what operations per second are, what is the power of your desktop computer, and what is the power of the super-megapap computer on the planet.
To measure the computing power of computers, a unit of measurement is used, called flops (flops, flop / s). Flops shows how many floating-point operations a computer performs in one second. In addition, to measure computing power, a concept such as a clock frequency is used. The processor clock frequency indicates how many basic operations the processor performs per second, and is measured in hertz. The main operation performed by the processor may include many operations with a floating point, so the measurement results in flops and hertz differ. If you find the “My Computer” icon on your desktop, right-click on it, open the properties in the drop-down menu, then the truth will open for you. Find the “System” header in the window that will open, and there, in front of the word “processor”, the clock frequency of your processor will be indicated. Most likely it will look like this: “2.10 GHz”. The number may vary slightly. So, 1 GHz is 1,000,000,000 hertz, or one billion operations per second. From this it follows that at a clock frequency of 2.10 gigahertz, the percent performs 2100000000 operations per second. This is certainly more than 1016. When measured in flops, the number will increase several times.
Go ahead. Titan's supercomputer from Cray inc. has an estimated computing power of 20 petaflops. 1 petaflops equals 10 ^ 15 flops. You can calculate for yourself what the number will turn out and how many zeros it has. As one poet said: “Well this is a bang ...”
')
Now about the brain. It's not as simple as with computers. At the present stage of development of neuroscience, it is quite difficult to calculate the computational power of the brain, and compare it with a computer. However, it is clear that we cannot perform the same operations that our laptop performs at the same speed and in the same volumes. Obviously, the computer is more powerful, yes? And no.
Let's take a closer look at how it works.
The brain is a biological neural network. The neural network consists of neurons, (in the case of the brain, these are brain cells), each of which is connected to other neurons. The place of communication of neurons is called a synapse. A chemical or electrical impulse is transmitted from one neuron through the synapse to another neuron. The number of neurons in the human brain is approximately equal to 100 billion (one hundred billion). Data from different sources differ slightly, but the overall picture is similar. Each of these neurons has from 7,000 to 10,000 synapses. On average, 10 pulses per second pass through one synapse, i.e. we have a clock frequency of 10 hertz per synoptic connection. And now entertaining mathematics: we multiply 100000000000 neurons by 10,000 of their synoptic connections and multiply all this by 10 hertz. We get a number with sixteen zeros after one, otherwise 10 ^ 16. So, where did the mysterious number 1016 come from. Apparently it just transformed in the course of an endless repost from public to public. And it turns out that our brain has more processing power than the Titan supercomputer. Ultimately, the author of a post about 1016 operations per second was right.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/265157/
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