From: Alfio Puglisi (puglisi@arcetri.astro.it)
Date: Sun Apr 07 2002 - 03:37:06 MDT
On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Sean Williams wrote:
>It seems to me that if even extraordinarily powerful computers
>are having difficulty accomplishing the former, how can we expect any
>genuine accuracy to creep into our personal models of the behaviour of
>immensely large numbers of neurons far removed from us (i.e.
>politicians past and present, from our cultures and others)? I know
>that the brain is a powerful neural net designed, in part, to
>recognise emergent properties in other such nets (i.e. the behaviour
>of
>people around us), but I think it's worth bearing in mind that no
>simulation we can run is likely to tease out the motives or
>aspirations of anyone in the Palestine/Israeli conflict with any great
>accuracy.
Lurking on this list, and reading most of the posts, I didn't see this
connection. Great!
Anyway, I think that the difficulties with simulating neurons are more on
the knowledge side - the horsepower should be enough for little worm-like
simulations, if we knew what exactly to simulate. On the contrary, even
with a good human model in hand, you would be hard-pressed to find the
hardware to run it.
Alfio
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