EDIT: I was a bit hasty and phrased this wrong, I didn’t mean to suggest roundtrip is quadratic in length. The max roundtrip time is twice the diameter.
The density of neurons matters a lot. A larger brain means it takes longer for signals to propagate.
If the brain is 2x larger, it takes 4x longer for a two way communication. This is a large constraint in both biological brains and GPU design.
Actually out of curiosity, why 4x? (And what exactly do you mean by “2x larger”?) (And is this for a naive algorithm which can be improved upon or a tight constraint?)
Sorry i phrased this wrong. You are right. I meant roundtrip time which is twice the length but scales linearly not quadratically.
I actually ran the debate contest to get to the bottom of Jake Cannells arguments. Some of the argument, especially around the landauer argument dont hold up but i think it s important not to throw out the baby with bathwater. I think most of the analysis holds up.
Yeah I read that prize contest post, that was much of where I got my impression of the “consensus”. It didn’t really describe which parts you still considered valuable. I’d be curious to know which they are? My understanding was that most of the conclusions made in that post were downstream of the Landauer limit argument.
Thanks for pointing that out! I will tell my friends to make sure they actually get good data for the metabolic cost and not just use cortical neuron count as proxy if they cannot find something good.
(Or is there also another point you wanted to make?) And yeah it’s actually also an argument for why orcas might be less intelligent (if they sorta use their neurons less often). Thanks.
EDIT: I was a bit hasty and phrased this wrong, I didn’t mean to suggest roundtrip is quadratic in length. The max roundtrip time is twice the diameter.
The density of neurons matters a lot. A larger brain means it takes longer for signals to propagate. If the brain is 2x larger, it takes 4x longer for a two way communication. This is a large constraint in both biological brains and GPU design.
Actually out of curiosity, why 4x? (And what exactly do you mean by “2x larger”?) (And is this for a naive algorithm which can be improved upon or a tight constraint?)
I highly recommend the following sources for a deep dive into these topics and more:
Jacob Cannells’ brain efficiency post https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/xwBuoE9p8GE7RAuhd/brain-efficiency-much-more-than-you-wanted-to-know [thought take the Landauer story with a grain of salt]
and the extraordinary Principles of Neural Design by Sterling & Laughlin https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262534680/principles-of-neural-design/
Could you explain or directly link to something about the 4x claim? Seems wrong. Communication speed scales with distance not area.
I thought the consensus on that post was that it was mostly bullshit?
Sorry i phrased this wrong. You are right. I meant roundtrip time which is twice the length but scales linearly not quadratically.
I actually ran the debate contest to get to the bottom of Jake Cannells arguments. Some of the argument, especially around the landauer argument dont hold up but i think it s important not to throw out the baby with bathwater. I think most of the analysis holds up.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fm88c8SvXvemk3BhW/brain-efficiency-cannell-prize-contest-award-ceremony
Yeah I read that prize contest post, that was much of where I got my impression of the “consensus”. It didn’t really describe which parts you still considered valuable. I’d be curious to know which they are? My understanding was that most of the conclusions made in that post were downstream of the Landauer limit argument.
Thanks for pointing that out! I will tell my friends to make sure they actually get good data for the metabolic cost and not just use cortical neuron count as proxy if they cannot find something good.
(Or is there also another point you wanted to make?)And yeah it’s actually also an argument for why orcas might be less intelligent (if they sorta use their neurons less often). Thanks.