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How many calculations can a brain do?

Updated: 8/11/2023
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11y ago

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The desktop computer you're using right now to read this message likely has sufficient power to perform calculations faster than all 6.7 billion human beings on earth combined. Computers are ruthlessly fast at number crunching.

Brains are great at storing information and recalling facts, making connections between distantly related things, and recognizing patterns. But for mathematical computation, brains are no match for transistors. The i/o interface is terrible. Most people require about a second to recognize and compute the product of two single digit numbers.

I'm using an old slow PC, and a BASIC compiler (QB45). The short piece of code I wrote to select two single digit numbers at random, compute their product, and index a counter required 32 seconds to complete a million iterations. Your average human being could do about 32 in the same amount of time. Had I written this program in assembly language, I could reduce the time by a factor of 10, even on this old slow machine. I need to run this from my home PC, just for kicks, to compare results.

Update: Since I last wrote this answer four years ago (Dec 2008) I tried it again using a newer PC. The new program uses a function to select and truncate two two digit integers and compute their product inside nested machine loops. Interactively the program executed a million times in just under two seconds. Compiled, it still took 1.6 seconds, shaving off 8/10ths of a second. Meanwhile, the human population surpassed the seven billion mark, and individual humans still cannot compute any faster than before.

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