A computer can perform calculations faster than MOST human brains... however there are people who have beaten computers at calculating ridiculous numeric calculations

That statement is absurd. Shakuntala Devi took 28 seconds to compute 7686369774870 * 2465099745779. That's quite a feat, no doubt. It would be hard for me to measure how long it takes my laptop to make that computation, but the order of magnitude is 0.00000001 seconds.

Thank you Alvaro, I didn't realize my 20 cents calculator was more intelligent than me, just because it can perform calculations I can't do myself. You seem to have a very good, clever and nice idea about what intelligence is.

We are facing the Human VS Nature Dunning-Kruger effect ...

Are you high, or asleep ?

A computer can perform calculations faster than MOST human brains... however there are people who have beaten computers at calculating ridiculous numeric calculations

That statement is absurd. Shakuntala Devi took 28 seconds to compute 7686369774870 * 2465099745779. That's quite a feat, no doubt. It would be hard for me to measure how long it takes my laptop to make that computation, but the order of magnitude is 0.00000001 seconds.

Thank you Alvaro, I didn't realize my 20 cents calculator was more intelligent than me, just because it can perform calculations I can't do myself. You seem to have a very good, clever and nice idea about what intelligence is.

A computer can perform calculations faster than MOST human brains... however there are people who have beaten computers at calculating ridiculous numeric calculations

That statement is absurd. Shakuntala Devi took 28 seconds to compute 7686369774870 * 2465099745779. That's quite a feat, no doubt. It would be hard for me to measure how long it takes my laptop to make that computation, but the order of magnitude is 0.00000001 seconds.

Thank you Alvaro, I didn't realize my 20 cents calculator was more intelligent than me, just because it can perform calculations I can't do myself. You seem to have a very good, clever and nice idea about what intelligence is.

Clearly I was making the argument that calculators are more intelligent than people because they can multiply faster. Good reading comprehension!

I really don't want to be mean with you, you give so much to this community ... I sincerely mean it ....

This discussion makes me very sad and crazy ...

But Intelligence has nothing to do with the ability to perform fastly some computation... This is the ability to evolve given stimuli (inputs) ... the ability to learn !

But Intelligence has nothing to do with the ability to perform fastly some computation...

Good thing then no-one tried to make that argument.

All alvaro did was to (rightly) call out on the absurd claim that some humans can perform calculations faster then computers.

After all, that was what computers was invented for, to offload calculation work from human brains, and to do it faster and more error free

Actually the brain performs computations pathetically slow, being clocked at roughly 12-15Hz in rest and 30-50Hz under heavy load and having a "wire speed" of roughly 100-120 m/s (as compared to 3GHz and 300,000km/s in a computer).

However, the brain is an incredibly massive parallel processor with an equally complex "wiring", and with dedicated "special hardware" attached, which takes care of everyday survival tasks such as controlling circulation and respiration, or doing "trivial" stuff like standing on one foot with your eyes closed (without falling).

Actually the brain performs computations pathetically slow, being clocked at roughly 12-15Hz in rest and 30-50Hz under heavy load and having a "wire speed" of roughly 100-120 m/s (as compared to 3GHz and 300,000km/s in a computer).

Could you post a link to where you saw this because i'm certain that i read the brain is like an 18000MHz or more processor and the reason it can't perform certain mathematical calculations very fast is because of the body systems it manages.

*edit* make that the brain is over a 1,680,000 MHz processor and does up to/more than 100,000,000 MIPS so there is no way the brain is nearly that slow.

Are you the kind of person that considers a 6 core processor with each core running at 3 GHz to be the same as a single 18 GHz core?

Could you post a link to where you saw this because i'm certain that i read the brain is like an 18000MHz or more processor and the reason it can't perform certain mathematical calculations very fast is because of the body systems it manages.

Well, the signals that you can capture with an EEG are typically 12-15 Hz ("beta" waves) when awake and idle and 30+ ("gamma" waves) when heftily troubled, During sleep it's around 4-5 Hz or lower, but that's not surprising.

What you can capture with an EEG are not the countless "noise" impulses of single neurons firing (these happen all the time, but they sum up to zero in the reading, since they're vectors of equal size pointing in semi-random directions), but great wavefronts running over the brain in a coordinated manner. One such wavefront produces one "wave" in the EEG. In other words, the time between two waves is one round trip time. I think it's fair to consider this the "frequency" of the brain.

Even though, of course, the brain does not really have a notion of frequency like a computer (there is no quartz or such!).

But still 50Hz times multiplied with 1014 is a darn big number of operations (or whatever the real number is, most estimates seem to be around 1013 to 1015).