A question I’m not sure how to phrase to Google, and which has so far made Facebook friends think too hard and go back to doing work at work: what is the maximum output bandwidth of a human, in bits/sec? That is, from your mind to the outside world. Sound, movement, blushing, EKG. As long as it’s deliberate. What’s the most an arbitrarily fast mind running in a human body could achieve?
(gwern pointed me at the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap; the question of extracting data from an intact brain is covered in Appendix E, but without numbers and mostly with hypothetical technology.)
Why not simply estimate it yourself? These sorts of things aren’t very hard to do. For example, you can estimate typing as follows: peak at 120 WPM; words are average 4 characters; each character (per Shannon and other’s research; see http://www.gwern.net/Notes#efficient-natural-language ) conveys ~1 bit; hence your typing bandwidth is 120 4 1 = <480 bits per minute or <8 bits per second.
Do that for a few modalities like speech, and sum.
I’ve just noticed he said “an arbitrarily fast mind running in a human body”, not an actual human being, so I don’t think it would be much slower at typing uuencoded compressed stuff than natural language (at least with QWERTY—it might be different with keyboards layouts optimized from natural language such as Dvorak, but still probably within a factor of a few).
The 120WPM is pretty good for the physical limits: if you are typing at 120WPM, then you have not hit the limits of your thinking (imagine you are in a typing tutor—your reading speed ought to be at least 3x 120WPM...), and you’re not too far off some of the sustained typing numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_entry
La Wiki is apparently not using the entropy estimates extracted from human predictions (who are the best modelers of natural language). Crude stuff like trigram models are going to considerably overestimate matters.
As a baseline estimate for just the muscular system, the worlds faster drummer can play at about 20 beats per second. That’s probably an upper limit on twitch speeds of human muscles, even with a arbitrarily fast mind running in the body. Assuming you had a system on the receiving end that could detect arbitrary muscle contractions, and could control each muscle in your body independently (again, this is an arbitrarily fast mind, so I’d think it should be able to), there are about 650 muscle groups in the body according to wikipedia, so I would say a good estimate for just the muscular system would be 650 x 20bits/s or about 13 Kb/s.
Once you get into things like EKGs, I think it all depends on how much control the mind actually has over processes that are largely subconscious, as well as how sensitive your receiving devices are. That could make the bandwidth much higher, but I don’t know a good way to estimate that.
20 beats per second is for two-handed drumming over one minute, so that’s only 10bits/s/muscle theoretical maximum. There doesn’t seem to be any organized competition for one-handed drumming, but Takahashi Meijin was famous for button mashing at 16 presses per second with only one hand, although for much shorter times.
Don’t you have to define the receiver as well as the transmitter, to have any idea about the channel bandwidth? I mean, if the “outside world” is the Dark Lords of the Matrix, the theoretical maximum output bandwidth is the processing speed of the mind.
Short of having a precise definition of “deliberate” I don’t think it’s possible to give a precise number, but for a Fermi estimate… Dammit! Gwern has already made the calculation I was thinking of!
A question I’m not sure how to phrase to Google, and which has so far made Facebook friends think too hard and go back to doing work at work: what is the maximum output bandwidth of a human, in bits/sec? That is, from your mind to the outside world. Sound, movement, blushing, EKG. As long as it’s deliberate. What’s the most an arbitrarily fast mind running in a human body could achieve?
(gwern pointed me at the Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap; the question of extracting data from an intact brain is covered in Appendix E, but without numbers and mostly with hypothetical technology.)
Why not simply estimate it yourself? These sorts of things aren’t very hard to do. For example, you can estimate typing as follows: peak at 120 WPM; words are average 4 characters; each character (per Shannon and other’s research; see http://www.gwern.net/Notes#efficient-natural-language ) conveys ~1 bit; hence your typing bandwidth is 120 4 1 = <480 bits per minute or <8 bits per second.
Do that for a few modalities like speech, and sum.
I’ve just noticed he said “an arbitrarily fast mind running in a human body”, not an actual human being, so I don’t think it would be much slower at typing uuencoded compressed stuff than natural language (at least with QWERTY—it might be different with keyboards layouts optimized from natural language such as Dvorak, but still probably within a factor of a few).
The 120WPM is pretty good for the physical limits: if you are typing at 120WPM, then you have not hit the limits of your thinking (imagine you are in a typing tutor—your reading speed ought to be at least 3x 120WPM...), and you’re not too far off some of the sustained typing numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_entry
My point was that 1 bit per character is an underestimate.
La Wik says 8 bits per word, FWIW.
La Wiki is apparently not using the entropy estimates extracted from human predictions (who are the best modelers of natural language). Crude stuff like trigram models are going to considerably overestimate matters.
As a baseline estimate for just the muscular system, the worlds faster drummer can play at about 20 beats per second. That’s probably an upper limit on twitch speeds of human muscles, even with a arbitrarily fast mind running in the body. Assuming you had a system on the receiving end that could detect arbitrary muscle contractions, and could control each muscle in your body independently (again, this is an arbitrarily fast mind, so I’d think it should be able to), there are about 650 muscle groups in the body according to wikipedia, so I would say a good estimate for just the muscular system would be 650 x 20bits/s or about 13 Kb/s.
Once you get into things like EKGs, I think it all depends on how much control the mind actually has over processes that are largely subconscious, as well as how sensitive your receiving devices are. That could make the bandwidth much higher, but I don’t know a good way to estimate that.
20 beats per second is for two-handed drumming over one minute, so that’s only 10bits/s/muscle theoretical maximum. There doesn’t seem to be any organized competition for one-handed drumming, but Takahashi Meijin was famous for button mashing at 16 presses per second with only one hand, although for much shorter times.
Don’t you have to define the receiver as well as the transmitter, to have any idea about the channel bandwidth? I mean, if the “outside world” is the Dark Lords of the Matrix, the theoretical maximum output bandwidth is the processing speed of the mind.
Let’s say “detectable as data by 2014 technology”.
Short of having a precise definition of “deliberate” I don’t think it’s possible to give a precise number, but for a Fermi estimate… Dammit! Gwern has already made the calculation I was thinking of!