Interesting! I’m thinking of CPU brach predictors, are you? (Are there other examples? Don’t know much about CPUs.) If so, that did seem like a suggestive analogy to what I was calling “the accelerator”.
Not sure about etiology. How different is a neocortex from the pallium in a bird or lizard? I’m inclined to say “only superficially different”, although I don’t think it’s known for sure. But if so, then there’s a version of it even in lampreys, if memory serves. I don’t know the evolutionary history of the cerebellum, or of the cerebellum-pallium loops. It might be in this paper by Cisek which I read but haven’t fully processed / internalized.
Branch predictors for sure, but modern CPUs also do things like managing multiple layers of cache using relatively simple algorithms that nonetheless in practice get high hit rates, conversion of instructions into microcode because it turns out small, simple instructions execute faster but CPUs need to do a lot of things so the tradeoff is to have the CPU interpret the instructions in real time into simpler instructions sent to specialized processing units inside the CPU, and maybe even optimistic branch execution, where instructions in the pipeline are partially executed provisionally ahead of branches being confirmed. All of these things seem like tricks of the sort I wouldn’t be surprised to find parallels to in the brain.
Interesting! I’m thinking of CPU brach predictors, are you? (Are there other examples? Don’t know much about CPUs.) If so, that did seem like a suggestive analogy to what I was calling “the accelerator”.
Not sure about etiology. How different is a neocortex from the pallium in a bird or lizard? I’m inclined to say “only superficially different”, although I don’t think it’s known for sure. But if so, then there’s a version of it even in lampreys, if memory serves. I don’t know the evolutionary history of the cerebellum, or of the cerebellum-pallium loops. It might be in this paper by Cisek which I read but haven’t fully processed / internalized.
Branch predictors for sure, but modern CPUs also do things like managing multiple layers of cache using relatively simple algorithms that nonetheless in practice get high hit rates, conversion of instructions into microcode because it turns out small, simple instructions execute faster but CPUs need to do a lot of things so the tradeoff is to have the CPU interpret the instructions in real time into simpler instructions sent to specialized processing units inside the CPU, and maybe even optimistic branch execution, where instructions in the pipeline are partially executed provisionally ahead of branches being confirmed. All of these things seem like tricks of the sort I wouldn’t be surprised to find parallels to in the brain.