Human brain vs supercomputers

Have you ever tried to match your wits with a computer? Perhaps you’ve tried playing it in a game of chess or raced to perform a calculation before your laptop could spit out the correct answer.

You have probably lost the chess game, and the computer has definitely beaten you in the math race. If you take the human brain’s ability against a computer at face value, it seems as if a computer is faster and smarter, but in fact, there is much more to the story.

If you had asked the same question a few decades ago, there would be no question… the human brain could circle around computers, but is that still true? Has technology begun to catch up with the most remarkable and reverent organ in the human body?

Since the birth of the first computers, there has been a direct comparison between these “calculating machines” and the human brain. One of the common phrases circulating for decades, promoting the idea of a “brain versus computer” argument, is “brains are analog, computers are digital.”

This makes it seem as if computers are superior, but the truth is that the human brain is much more advanced and efficient and has more raw computing power than the most impressive supercomputers ever built.

At the time of this writing, the fastest supercomputer globally is the Tianhe-2 in Guangzhou, China, and has a maximum processing speed of 54.902 petaFLOPS. A petaFLOP is a quadrillion (one thousand trillion) floating-point calculations per second. That’s a huge amount of calculations, yet that doesn’t even come close to the processing speed of the human brain.

In contrast, our miraculous brains operate on the next order higher. Although it is impossible to calculate precisely, it is postulated that the human brain operates at 1 exaFLOP, equivalent to a billion billion calculations per second.

In 2014, some clever researchers in Japan tried to match the processing power in one second from one percent of the brain. That doesn’t sound very much, but the world’s fourth-fastest supercomputer, the K Computer, took 40 minutes to crunch the calculations for a single second of brain activity!

The fastest supercomputers created thus far (like the one seen above) haven’t even breached the 50 petaflop mark, which is still 20 times slower than the human brain’s processing speed, not to mention…they’re massive!

Experts believe that exascale computing could be possible by 2020, but Intel, one of the largest technology companies in the world, boasted that they would have achieved that capability by 2018. By creating legitimate artificial brain modeling, we will explore real-time simulations of human brain activity – a breakthrough.

Moreover, the key interests of everything from engineering and basic research to national security agencies and telecommunications giants are eager to see what this dreamed-of level of technological progress will bring.

However, as we have explained above, there are some serious problems in achieving this level of technical sophistication, namely energy, memory, and physical limitations. Even with new advances in graphene transistors and the complex capabilities of quantum computers, a purely artificial brain seems out of reach with the real thing – for now.

scienceabc.com