Larry and me, not on same Page

In 1998 Page and Brin wrote their now famous paper on what is now popularly called "Page Rank". I think that's great work but, against popular belief, I must say that that does not make Larry Page God. Nor does it make him an expert on all things technological. Why the outburst? Well recently, John Battelle reported Larry Page talking about AI and

how the human brain compares to that of an operating system

What he says is inaccurate both Biologically and Technologically. That in itself is not surprising, what is shocking is the fact that the majority of the media/blogosphere seem to be accepting what he says implicitly. Frankly speaking his argument is a joke.



Watch the video and you will see Page talking about DNA:

If you look at your DNA its just about 600 MB compressed, which is smaller than any operating system. Your Linux, windows any operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right ... by definition. So your algorithms are probably not that complicated, its probably about the overall computation.

I hate to be the one to break this to you Page, but on this, you have no idea what you are talking about.



First off, lets start with what the technologically inconsistencies are in Page's argument. The assumption that AI will require huge amounts of computational power is one which is seriously flawed. There are innumerable people working on AI who explicitly state that this is not something that is seriously necessary.

How powerful are the best present-day supercomputers? A quick glance at top500.org lets us find out.

The computational power of many of these machines are rapidly approaching human equivalency, if not already surpassing it. (Depending on which estimate you use.) A common estimate for the human brain's processing power is 100 Tflops/sec (10^15 floating operations per second), but neuroscientific and evolutionary evidence suggests this may be an overestimate (Bostrom 1997). Values as low as 100 Gflops/sec (10^13 floating operations per second) have been proposed (Moravec 1998). The vast majority of computing experts, including the people at Intel, predict the continuous acceleration of available computing power through 2015 at least, at which point we would need to switch to nanocomputing or quantum computing to maintain continuous progress. The point at which human-equivalent computing power becomes available is highly significant because it puts the possibility of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) within reach. The creation of AGI would signify the arrival of a new intelligent species, the greatest milestone in humanity's history, and either our extinction or salvation - depending on its motivations (Bostrom 2003).

Original Source

Points of note

1. Powerful computers exist outside Google
2. These maybe "as fast as the human brain"
3. Computing power reaching the speeds of that of the human brain is important

But, how important is speed? Further down the same article the author talks about this:

The really interesting thing about engineering AGI, however, is that computer scientists won't necessarily need human-equivalent computing power to implement successful Artificial Intelligence. Implementing AGI with 1/100th, or even 1/1000th computing power may be possible. Biological evolution, being a nonforesightful process constrained by the inherent mechanics of biology, incremental adaptation, the constant necessity for an immediate fitness advantage, weakness with simultaneous dependencies, and so on, falls far short of the efficiency and foresight that human experts can muster.

Original Source

Points of note:

1. We don't necessarily need Human-equivalent computing power to implement successful AI

What is more disturbing is Page's comparison between the function of the human DNA and that of operating systems. Lets go through what the actual role of DNA is. Now I am not a Biologist, but here is a gist of what one of my friends explained to me:

Original image location here.

DNA contains the "instructions" for the development of living organisms. This does not imply that DNA is an OS. What then does the DNA do?

The structural and functional aspects of a living being are determined by proteins and the interactions between proteins. DNA is used by cells to create these proteins through a fairly complex process:

The first step in this process is that of Transcription wherein that part of the DNA "describing" the protein ( called the gene ) that is currently need is "copied". The "copy" takes the form of an RNA strand, which can basically be though of as a temporary storage of the protein structure.

Animations depicting Transcription:
Very Basic
Another basic
Technical


The next step is the process of Translation wherein the information in the RNA is used to create the protein.

Animations depicting Translation:
Very Basic
Another Basic one
Technical


One would think it stops here but the way in which the protein then folds up again plays a fundamental role in the function of the protein. In fact there exist proteins call prions which when folded in one way can be useful to the body but when folded the other cause diseases. In fact their linear structure ( primary structure ), the orientation and details of folding ( secondary structure ), the three dimensional structure ( tertiary structure ) and finally the way in which multiple chains club together ( quaternary structure ) all play a vital role in the functioning of the protein.

What is also interesting is the fact that given a primary structure of a protein and the environment it is likely to exist in, there is, as yet, no way of pre-calculating the final three dimensional structure with a hundred percent certainty. So just the sequence of DNA does not tell you what interactions are going to happen in a cell.



Consider all of this and now consider what we started off with:

If you look at your DNA its just about 600 MB compressed, which is smaller than any operating system. Your Linux, windows any operating system. That includes booting up your brain, right ... by definition. So your algorithms are probably not that complicated, its probably about the overall computation.

Way to go Page ...