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Cached Thoughts

readthesequences.com · 923 words · saved by 1 readers

One of the single greatest puzzles about the human brain is how the damn thing works at all when most neurons fire 10–20 times per second, or 200Hz tops. In neurology, the “hundred-step rule” is that any postulated operation has to complete in at most 100 sequential steps—you can be as parallel as you like, but you can’t postulate more than 100 (preferably fewer) neural spikes one after the other. Can you imagine having to program using 100Hz CPUs, no matter how many of them you had? You’d also need a hundred billion processors just to get anything done in realtime. If you did need to write realtime programs for a hundred billion 100Hz processors, one trick you’d use as heavily as possible is caching. That’s when you store the results of previous operations and look them up next time, instead of recomputing them from scratch. And it’s a very neural idiom—recognition, association, completing the pattern. It’s a good guess that the actual majority of human cognition consists of cache loo

Cached Thoughts Source Markdown · Talk Home About Search Contents Cached Thoughts ❦ One of the single greatest puzzles about the human brain is how the damn thing works at all when most neurons fire 10–20 times per second, or 200Hz tops. In neurology, the “hundred-step rule” is that any postulated operation has to complete in at most 100 sequential steps—you can be as parallel as you like, but you can’t postulate more than 100 (preferably fewer) neural spikes one after the other. Can you imagine having to program using 100Hz CPUs, no matter how many of them you had? You’d also need a hundred b

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