Re: Fwd: We Can Understand Anything, But are Just a Bit Slow

From: Philip Goetz (philgoetz@gmail.com)
Date: Sun Apr 23 2006 - 11:25:39 MDT


My intuition, based on experience with how much computational power it
takes to solve a problem of a particular size, and on Rescher's law of
logarithmic returns, is that exponentially-increasing computational
power is required to provide linear increase in "smartness", or some
measure of the problems we can handle. For instance, finding primes
of 2N bits takes much more than twice the computational power of
finding primes of N bits.

I also expect that the computational complexity of cognition is an
exponential function of the size of working memory, so that if we
currently have a working memory that can store 5 chunks, the amount of
computation available in the universe limits us to some double-digit
number of chunks.



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