Here’s a Quora question about changes in Earth biomass over time.
(I think if you spent some time on these estimates they’d turn out different from the numbers in the model; we did this mostly to check rough order of magnitude over the course of a couple hours, finding that evolution will not be simulable with foreseeable compute.)
So your focus was specifically on the compute performed by animal brains.
I expect total brain compute is dwarfed by the computation inside cells (transcription & translation). Which in turn is dwarfed by the computation done by non-organic matter to implement natural selection. I had totally overlooked this last part!
Non-brain matter is most of the compute for a naive physics simulation, however it’s plausible that it could be sped up a lot, e.g. the interiors of rocks are pretty static and similar to each other so maybe they can share a lot of computation. For brains it would be harder to speed up the simulation without changing the result a lot.
FLOPs = floating point operations per second.
FLOPz = the same thing, I think (it’s used as if it’s in the FLOPs unit).
I don’t remember the sources for everything. If you want to get a more accurate estimate I recommend re-running with your own numbers.
Here are some estimates of brain compute.
Here’s an estimate of the mass of a human brain.
Here’s an estimate of current animal biomass.
Here are brain to body mass ratios for different species. Here’s an estimate of the composition of animal biomass which should help figure out which brain-to-body-mass numbers to use.
Here’s a Quora question about changes in Earth biomass over time.
(I think if you spent some time on these estimates they’d turn out different from the numbers in the model; we did this mostly to check rough order of magnitude over the course of a couple hours, finding that evolution will not be simulable with foreseeable compute.)
Great links, thank you!!
So your focus was specifically on the compute performed by animal brains.
I expect total brain compute is dwarfed by the computation inside cells (transcription & translation). Which in turn is dwarfed by the computation done by non-organic matter to implement natural selection. I had totally overlooked this last part!
Non-brain matter is most of the compute for a naive physics simulation, however it’s plausible that it could be sped up a lot, e.g. the interiors of rocks are pretty static and similar to each other so maybe they can share a lot of computation. For brains it would be harder to speed up the simulation without changing the result a lot.