Here’s a geeky topic for you…calling on the knowledge of unrepentant geeks everywhere, I ask you: what are the known system requirements needed to run an Artificial Intelligence, in various works of science fiction?
I’m talking about information about computational speed, storage capacity, etc. Simply mentioning an A.I. using, say, an “AA-1 Verbobrain” CPU doesn’t count, unless we have some information on a Verbobrain’s capabilities. However, completely fictional units of measurement (“The Tobor-1 can store up to 56 googolfarbs of information.” ) are acceptable, as long as they’re at least semi-official.
Anyway, the three A.I.s I’ve been able to gather at least some technical information on:
Commander Data—His brain has a storage capacity of 800 quadrillion bits of information, and can perform 60 trillion operations per second.
The Doctor (ST: Voyager)—At least 50 million “gigaquads.” (A “quad” is a purposely vague unit of data measurement used on Star Trek nowadays, if not always consistently.) So, the Doctor has…what, ten quadrillion “quads”?
“After market installation” of athletic abilities and a “grand master chess program” take up 9 Megaquads, just by themselves.
Synthetic Humans—As in the movie Aliens. According to my technical manual, a run of the mill android from 2179 has a processor sped of 10(15) floating point operations per second; and a memory capacity of 1 Terabyte of “fast cash buffer RAM” and 1.2 Petabytes of non-volatile memory.
I’m not sure there is a way to give a meaningful answer. It also depends on what your test for AI is. If you limit to a specific area it’s actually not that hard to build a Turing machine that will fool a lot of people. If you want to build an “Ash” that will fool everyone until the alien impales his Eelmer’s glue bleeding ass that is another matter.
Part of the problems is we really don’t fully know how a brain works. Bits of it yes but we’re still making crude AI models of neural networks with deterministic computers. I’m not saying that we can’t ever understand that or build a better model of a brain but we sure as hell can’t now. Numbers are thrown around because they sound good. Terabytes? Pfff! I’m not impressed, I work in data warehousing. When you talk petabytes I might raise an eyebrow but even that with the computers we have now won’t get you there.
Mycroft Holmes, in Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, was said to have (IIRC) 1.5x as many “neuristors” as humans have neurons, for about 150 billion such units.
Not sure what components are required to build a neuristor.
Uh, Padeye? I wasn’t asking what the an actual A.I.'s system requirments might be, I’m just curious about the listed “system capabilites” for various fictional A.I.s. It’s about obscure science-fiction trivia, not what it would take to do it in real life.
In Stanislaw Lem’s The Cyberiad, Mimosh the Self-Begotten was made of random metallic and silicoid junk that happened to land in the right way in a pool of slightly acidic run-off. Over the course of several centuries he composed his first thoughts until further random events caused him to fall apart, without anyone ever knowing he had existed.
Hmm…there’s an Iain M Banks book where one of the Culture Minds reviews its storage capabilities.
Mind : “Imagine a sheet of paper covered in text. Now imagine a filing cabinet full of paper. Now imagine a room filled with filing cabinets. Now imagine a building filled with rooms, filled with filing cabinets. Now imagine a city filled with buildings. Now imagine the city covers the entire surface of a planet, and that still isn’t close the amount of information I can recall.”
Right, my estimate: if there are say 1000 characters on the paper, 5000 sheets in a cabinet, 50 cabinets in a room, 200 rooms in a building, 20k buildings in a city, and let’s make it 1 million times the size of a normal city to cover the planet… (or choose your own values and feed them into a spreadsheet )
I get 1E+21. Phew, that’s quite a lot. Getting close to Avogadro’s Number, in fact.
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