Computational Model and Human Brain

Computation has become so much important that it has become impossible to live without it in modern times. The computation has spread across our day-to-day life in various ways. We use cell phone, we use various other computational devices for our livelihood in every home utilities as well as in many other technology. Further, computation has become a tool for the advancement of science in the pursuance of knowledge. It is of course true that we are yet to define what we suppose to be calling as a knowledge.  We have discussed on the definition of knowledge in other article. In the set of knowledge that has been learned so far by the scholars, the computation is one such which needs to be understood further. The curiosity has lead the investigation further to learn about the nature of computation and computation in  the Nature that we live in. This article is a set of thoughts to understand the nature of the human brain in the light of computational model. Our interest is to understand the structure and functionality of the human brain in contrast with the computational model. Is computation one of the fundamental principles of Nature? Does this material nature also performs a unique kind of computation in order to sustain the activities? As computer science has evolved theoretically as well as physically with the advent of different technology and computational model, it is appropriate to contrast the current computational technology with that of the human brain. 

The computation has been defined in terms of an abstract machine called Turing machine by Alan Turing a British mathematician. This definition has become a model for the theoretical study of computer science. The model describes the process of computation as information processing where the information is represented in the form of a set of well-defined symbols. The processing is controlled by an automated machine which can be called a controller, technically this can be termed as a state machine. Further, the processing requires an ability to remember the past for which a memory device is used called tap. With these three components, the Turing machine is constructed which defines what computation suppose to be. Most of the modern computational devices which are most popular are based on this definition. The physical counterpart of this definition is the Von-Neumann architecture (of course there is another architecture called Stanford Architecture conceptually similar with VNA.) which describes further how a machine could process the symbols in a step-by-step manner to reach at a conclusive result. Therefore, it can be said that the Von-Neumann architecture introduces additional components with data and control paths to facilitate the flow of information and data. This architecture, VNA, has been widespread now in almost all the processors that are currently being manufactured. Among many such processors, the general-purpose processors are most popular due to its basic properties of being programmable. The programmability feature implies that the same processor could be used to carry out multiple tasks. It is for that reason called as a general-purpose processor. It is the program that is unique for a particular task. The underlying processor is common. At the first look when we contrast this architecture with that of our human brain we find that our brain is something different from the architecture that we have just described. As time progress and along with that the human needs which can be termed as applications also is emerging with various demand. One such demand is performance. The applications that the modern computer process are complex in nature and therefore they demand high-performance computing. As the demand for high-performance computing rises, there have been several pieces of research that attempt to meet this performance demand. One of the interesting advancements in this direction to note is the development of application-specific accelerators. Here comes the something worth noting point which is the subject of this article. If we carefully observe the application-specific accelerators, it is one-to-one with the architecture of the human brain. Whereas not the general-purpose processor architecture. 

The interesting part to investigate is how far the application-specific accelerator  architecture would be correlated with the human brain architecture. And, would it be the appropriate architecture for neural processing? 

We will investigate further here.  

Reference: 1. Image is taken from: https://www.kurzweilai.net/how-brain-architecture-relates-to-consciousness-and-abstract-thought

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Jaynarayan, Bangalore, India

Artificially Intelligent Game Bots Pass the Turing Test on Turing’s Centenary

Following is an exciting news for those who are researching on Turing test and desperate  to see human like bot.

An artificially intelligent virtual gamer created by computer scientists at The University of Texas at Austin has won the BotPrize by convincing a panel of judges that it was more human-like than half the humans it competed against.

The competition was sponsored by 2K Games and was set inside the virtual world of “Unreal Tournament 2004,” a first-person shooter video game.

“The idea is to evaluate how we can make game bots, which are nonplayer characters (NPCs) controlled by AI algorithms, appear as human as possible,” said Risto Miikkulainen, professor of computer science in the College of Natural Sciences. Miikkulainen created the bot, called the UT^2 game bot, with doctoral students Jacob Schrum and Igor Karpov.

The bots face off in a tournament against one another and about an equal number of humans, with each player trying to score points by eliminating its opponents. Each player also has a “judging gun” in addition to its usual complement of weapons. That gun is used to tag opponents as human or bot.

More can be read at link

My comment: 

Although the news read that the bot has passed the Turing test, but it is not really by the definition of Turing test.  Definition matters lot. 

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Jaynarayan, Bangalore, India

Computation and Free will

The most debatable topic among researcher of computation  and consciousness is whether the living entity posses free will or not ? Most of the prominent scientists think that there is nothing like free will and everything that human being does is based on deterministic course of actions. According to some neuro-scientists the actions that a human being performs is nothing but a set of instructions executed in the brain in algorithmic fashion. Hence from that scientists speculate that there may not anything like free will, everything that happens is due to some complex algorithmic computation. However there are some phenomena which are really impossible to explain in terms algorithmic steps. Prof Penrose in his books Emperor's New Mind and Shadow of the Mind explains that there is something exists in the human which is non-computational in nature. He argues that the self awareness of human being is non-computational in nature. He compares this self awareness nature of human being with the various kind of action that a machine can mimic. Although the action that a machine can mimic might looks very similar to that the man can perform, however the difference between these is that the man is aware that he is performing something but the machine can not. Hence from this argument we can know that there is something which is non-computational in nature. Now, we have to see that how the similar kind of non-computational nature is also present in the will of human being which is known as free will. We will discuss the Vedic perspective on this free will in latter sections.

The free-will which is defined as a subjective choice of each individual  for their thoughts and action. Lets first consider the human being and try to observe and analyze some phenomena that  human being perform in his day to day life.  Lets try to observe the following sets of experiment; lets ask a person to make a foot path by walking for the first time and then let ask him to do the same for the second time and each time he does the we will color the foot print with unique colors. Now if we observe properly we can see that each of these foot path trace are different at least in one place (practically these foot prints are misaligned). From this observation the question comes why these foot prints are not aligned ? Lets do another experiment. Lets ask a person to write his own signature multiple times. In this case also we can see that none of these signature will match with each other exactly one-to-one. Why ? What is the reason for this ? 

Another kind of phenomena are also worth noticing. When we walk on the street or road  it is impossible for an observer to predict the movement of our feet or even it is not possible to predict the next step. Why this is a difficult problem although it does not seems like that ? Similarly it is difficult (perhaps impossible) to predict the projectile path of a flying bird.
  
Why it is difficult  to determine the next step in case of above described experiments. If we turn bit towards the machine we never faced any difficulty in determining the next step of computer. It is really very easy for some one to tell about the future steps of computer if he knows sufficient about the past and present state of computer. More technically, if some knows the current instructions he can very easily predict he next instruction to be executed by the processor. However in case of human foot step and trace of flying bird its seems that it is impossible to determine the next step. Science has its own approach to answer  this problem and similarly spirituality also its own approach to answer the same.

Looking from the modern science there are many attempt taken by prominent scientists mainly from neuro science. There opinions suggest that such kind of phenomena are mainly due to the collective behavior of  many neurons. Hence they hypothesizes that if we can learn sufficient enough the complex behavior of neurons it is possible to predict the future action of any living system(foot steps of human or trace of flying bird ). The spirituality goes beyond the neurons and answers the same question in quite differently. According to the Indian Vedic scripture each and every living entity are not just a lump of chemicals but they are spirit soul. The spirit soul has a set of fundamental property. One of its fundamental property is FREE WILL and because of this free will a living entity can act subjectively. The subjective action is only know to the performer but not to the observer. Hence according to the Vedic scripture the presence of free will is the cause of non deterministic action.

Jaynarayan, Bangalore, India