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Human Mind and Computers (An Uncanny Resemblance) - I

Human Mind, the single organ in Human body which consumes as much as 20% of the total energy consumed by the whole body combined together. Now, that's a feat for a small organ which constitutes only 2% of the net body mass. Every thought one have in their brain, every neuron which fires in your nervous system consumes energy.

Our Brain; the wonder machine


Since ages philosophers have pondered upon the mysterious capabilities of human brain and its abilities. We all might have heard the rumor in our childhood days that a grown adult uses only 20% of the total human brain; which I can tell you is a total bullshit, since a neurosurgeon would tell you that people with a small injury in brain cripples the functioning of specific parts of body partly or completely. It we were using just 20%, then there wouldn't have been much functional difference in our behavior even if a small part of our brain was damaged.



Human brain is unique from other animal brain in functional terms; humans have a cognitive ability which is found only in higher mammals including primates, elephants and dolphins. Humans are able to distinguish themselves from the surrounding in which they live. This makes them reason out things and think in a causal way. The animal cognition vary greatly in animals, while a chimpanzee can use sophisticated tools, dolphins and primates can distinguish themselves in an image by putting a mirror in front of them.

The most intelligent animals; apart from Homo Sapiens Sapiens


Even before computers were conceived, mathematicians and biologists were intrigued about the possibilities of "simulating" life in inanimate objects. John Horton Conway a Brit mathematician in 1970 devised a game or one can call an early simulation called Game of Life.This was his attempt to study the dynamics of life, although without any cognitive ability, this automaton, as this kind of life forms are called behaves like single celled organisms. 

The invention of super fast computers simply gave a "petri-dish" to researches to grow their "creations". Computers enabled early AI researchers to actually bring life to their hypothesis, to test them, to create them and to improve upon them. Computers became the testing ground of AI research. Computers and AI became so much synonymous that AI became a part of Computer Science, when before that it was a part of cognitive sciences. a part of Psychology.

Mathematicians and Computer Scientist have since then used computers to explore the dark areas of human mind and intelligence. Alan Turing, then a young man came with an intuitive test to measure the so called Human Intelligence. 

Turing in his seminal paper in ACM journal, argued that how would one know if machines could think? He suggested, when the response of a computer were indistinguishable from a Human; and formulated the same idea to the test which bore his name now. He proposed an examiner in a room alone provided with two text based terminals; one terminal will have a computer based AI program connected while another terminal will have a human present at other end. The role of the computer program is to convince the examiner that it's a Human, while the role of the human was to show to the examiner that he's the human. The examiner can ask questions to wither of the terminals using his keyboard, and he has to identify the computer program correctly among both. The examiner is only given text based terminal and keyboard essentially to make it more computer friendly and make the examiner less biased towards human centric feature like speaking and listening.


Every year, Loebner Prize; a competition is organized wherein AI programmers from around the world are asked to submit their program for testing Turing Test. Hugh Loebner pledged a Grand Prize of $100,000 and a Gold Medal for the first computer whose responses were indistinguishable from a human's.

The Loebner Gold Medal
The performance of machines in Loebner Prize is increasing each year. Computers stealthily conceal the silicon inside them from the examiner every year more efficiently from the previous year. 

Does it mean computers will outperform human in cognitive ability? Would computers take over humans as shown in the typical machine apocalypse Hollywood flick? Well some researcher don't believe such a day will come. More about that in Part II.


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Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

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