Just 50 Actors For Artificial Intelligence! (not really, but it sounds good for headline)

[AristosQueue (NI)]

As with so many bad science reporting headlines, the one above is over-sensational and misses the actually quite important aspect of the findings.

tl;dr: The human brain appears in MRI studies to have only 50 cores, and does not do parallelism at the individual neuron level, suggesting that there may be a much lower cost threshold for sentient computers than the expensive neural nets and similar architectures that have been the focus of AI research.

This was on slashdot.org this weekend. Links are off to the news report and to the ARVIX paper:

From MIT Technology Review: "The human brain carries out many tasks at the same time, but how many? Now fMRI data has revealed just how parallel gray matter is. ... Although the analysis is complex, the outcome is simple to state. Georgiou says independent component analysis reveals that about 50 independent processes are at work in human brains performing the complex visuo-motor tasks of indicating the presence of green and red boxes. However, the brain uses fewer processes when carrying out simple tasks, like visual recognition.

That's a fascinating result that has important implications for the way computer scientists should design chips intended to mimic human performance. It implies that parallelism in the brain does not occur on the level of individual neurons but on a much higher structural and functional level, and that there are about 50 of these. 'This means that, in theory, an artificial equivalent of a brain-like cognitive structure may not require a massively parallel architecture at the level of single neurons, but rather a properly designed set of limited processes that run in parallel on a much lower scale,' he concludes." Here's a link to the full paper: "Estimating the intrinsic dimension in fMRI space via dataset fractal analysis – Counting the `cpu co...."