[lyner]

We moved on to use a Univac 1108(?), on line, which was extremely sexy with a magnetic drum store and everything. I think they even used Bytes!

[LeeE]

I never saw any 1108s but we had an 1144 when I was at BP, which iirc had four computational nodes and two IO nodes - that was a big beastie, and had drums too.  Very big drums - we had a small team of Univac engineers permanently on-site for planned maintenance and to handle breakdowns and one day, when one of the engineers went to stop one of the drums for scheduled maintenance, it's brake failed - took quite a few hours before it eventually stopped, although a bit less than the twelve hours or so they were expecting.

They were the 36bit systems I worked on.

[Alan McDougall]

Well you guys have covered most of it, But remember the brain does not just hold information, thoughts and pictures in its enormous capacity. The unconscious system that controls how all our organs works including the brain is controlled by the brain every moment of our lives or we would promply die..

Is a computer intelligent? No it had no more intelligence than a doornob.

Think the Space Shuttle, possibly the most complex machine on earth. The humble cockroach it is unimaginably more complex and  and by comparison the Space Shuttle is just a mindless dead thing

 Alan

[JonBoy]

your brain cells are dying all the time,but by the time you are 26, 1.679 % of your brain cells will have died,  so you can go on for 3 lifetimes without havingany noticeable memory loss. 

[gbristow]

Seany,I think that human brain has more memory than computer because computer was invented by human brain. Human brain has negotiable skills where as the computer will work according to the instructions.
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Gary Bristow

newbielink:http://www.goinggreenbuzz.com [nonactive]

[Alan McDougall]

Seany,

Does this give a perspective, three times the total data in the Library Of Congress

[graham.d]

Ahh we are all showing our age here. First computer I worked with was the Manchester University Atlas. Later on the first mini-computers came into being like the DEC PDP8 (12 bit word).

Although the brain has a very different architecture to today's computers, it should still be theoretically possible to "map" a brain into a Von Neumann architecture (for example) even if not very efficiently. In that way the number of bits of memory could be determined. This would probably result in many more memory bits being used than the brain equivalent though, because of the inefficiency. Mapping the brain's plasticity and fluidity (the ability to forget for example) would take up memory in the software to do this. The brain's structure is very important in itself and not just the amount of memory.

An electronics example is associative memory (or Content Addressable Memory) used in specialist applications in the communications industry. Here you present a 64 bit word (for example) and it returns the memory address (or a sequence of addresses) for which there is a match. Partial matches can also be looked for by applying mask bits. It is a sort of backwards operating memory and has some similarity to the way the brain can sometimes operate. Implementing such a memory on a computer with software is very inefficient (a simple way is to simply search sequentially looking for matches) but takes a many times longer to complete.

Another issue with determining the number of bits of memory there is in the brain is how to translate analog level sensing into bits. Neurons work on analogue levels not just 0s and 1s. This is very efficient in the brain, but a digital computer would have to represent each of these analog levels with a number of bits (depending on the resolution required), which is not efficient. Counting neorons does not give you the number of memory bits therefore.

The question of how much memory is in the brain does not address the structural complexity issues which really dominate the problem. On one hand a computer could be built with sufficient memory (achievable today I would expect) but without any software or really too much guidance on how to organise the system behind any software, or, on the other hand, we could map various subsystems on to dedicated hardware and software sections and connect them into some overall hierarchy. The first is the more economic approach but would not produce an efficient system. But both systems depend on a deep knowledge of how the brain is structured. We are not even close to this level of understanding.