Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Slower thinking

If you search a larger and larger database, the search time takes longer and longer as you sequentially look through entries. This is such an excellent model of the parallelized and multi-processing human brain that the Telegraph can tell us that Brains of elderly slow because they know so much "The brains of older people only appear to slow down because they have so much information to compute, much like a full-up hard drive, scientists believe. "
A team at Tübingen University in Germany programmed a computer to read a certain amount each day and learn new words and commands.
When the researchers let a computer “read” only so much, its performance on cognitive tests resembled that of a young adult.
But if the same computer was exposed to the experiences we might encounter over a lifetime – with reading simulated over decades – its performance now looked like that of an older adult.
Often it was slower, but not because its processing capacity had declined. Rather, increased “experience” had caused the computer’s database to grow, giving it more data to process – which takes time.

I didn't look up who was on the team. I'm embarrassed for them. Their explanation that the elderly have more to process may be accurate, but their model has nothing to do with anything, and was a waste of time. If you have a ginormous database, you have to jump through all kinds of hoops if you want results fast. Water is wet, therefore wood is brown.

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