Density is also important. If we look at other things - some recent studies have been done on number-counting (https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2020.052...) or bird brains (https://www.gwern.net/docs/psychology/neuroscience/2020-herc...) - density jumps out as a major predictor. African elephants may have some more neurons, but the density isn't as great as a human where it counts, so they are remarkably intelligent (like ravens and crows), but still not human-level. There are diminishing returns in both directions. We have more neurons than any bird as much or more dense, and we have more density than any elephant with as many or more neurons. Put that together, and we squeak across the finish line to being just smart enough to create civilization.
An analogy: what's the difference between a supercomputer, and the same number of CPUs scattered across a few datacenters? It's that in a supercomputer, those CPUs are packed physically as close as possible with expensive interconnects to allow them to communicate as fast as possible. (For many applications, the supercomputer will finish long before the spread out nodes ever finish communicating and idling.) But you need to improve both or else your new super-fast CPUs will spend all their time waiting on Infiniband to chug through, or your fancy new Infiniband will be underutilized and you should've bought more CPUs.
My understanding is more than the density configuration of the neurons matters most. The reason is in some cases neural network with drop out's perform better than fully connected neural network. This proves less dense networks can be more intelligent.
I wouldn't say "plenty" - few primates, dolphins, orcas, elephants, and, strangely, magpies. But the grounds for that claim are shaky for some of them, the only 3 species we are 100% sure about are chimpanzees, orangutans, and humans. Magpies, for example, require "a training" (whatever that means).
Probably cause we've only tested a few, not that it matters though. Humans take a pretty long time to recognize themselves in the mirror. I wonder if the mirror test would change if we would expose the animals for a almost a year before doing the test, just like humans.
That said even ants pass the test, i.e. they were recently(2015) tested.
But the whole thing can be characterized as: "Let me make up a random test, according to my personal opinion of what defines cognition and then see if a random animal I choose passes it".
Every couple of years we have requests of slews of psychology papers requested to be invalidated because they're unreproducible.
> But the whole thing can be characterized as: "Let me make up a random test, according to my personal opinion of what defines cognition and then see if a random animal I choose passes it".
But of course! How do we know that humans are, indeed, the smartest? What if we've been failing every single test that mice have been throwing at us over the past millennia, and they wonder why we are so dumb?
(This is a reference to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in case you're wondering if I've gone mad. Not that one wouldn't presuppose the other :)
Dolphins and elephants are famous examples, most primates as well. Even many birds show levels of self awareness and theory of mind (they know the difference between what they know and what others know)
In fact there is a popular theory[1] that bird intelligence evolved because of the way their social structures work. Birds mate for life but they cheat. Every bird wants their partner to be loyal and itself to sex as many other birds as possible.
This means birds have to keep track of who can and can't see them cheat, who knows and who doesn't. There's even evidence that they rat each other out (2nd degree info) if they think there's a reward to be had. All of this requires immense intelligence, which happens to prove useful in other contexts.
There's also a bird species who does this with food caches. Easier to steal from others than to build their own so a plethora of deceptive tactics developed to ensure others can't see where you're storing those delicious nuts. Complete with fake caches, lying, and espionage.
There is proof, and you can find lots of studies and papers on it. HN is a bit cultish and likes to think that humans are far above every other creature on the planet in importance.
Because, IIRC, a lot of neurons are dedicated to motion/sensing.
Bigger animals may require more neurons to handle moving larger and/or more complicated muscle groups.
Interesting related point there is the encephalization quotient which is related to the predicted ratio of brain size to body mass. On the wikipedia page [0] they list the EQ for various animals. Humans are the highest but dolphins and ravens are not far behind.
To further emphasize that having neural material focused on the appropriate functions is more important vs how much you have, here is a story about a guy whose brain is mostly hollow and filled with fluid, it probably did cause his IQ to be 75 and causes him weakness in his legs, but otherwise he lives a normal adult life more or less.
Volume != neurons. In any case, 75 is awful and is usually considered borderline retarded. (If you're tempted to respond with other cases of higher IQ, note that they are often retracted or unconfirmed and likely fraudulent in some way; see https://www.gwern.net/Hydrocephalus .)
Exactly. Most of the newer research on this topic suggests that it's neural connection complexity, and specifically frontal lobe volume, rather than overall brain size that determines intelligence or brain power.
>Luckily, there is much more to a brain when you look at it under a microscope, and most neuroscientists now believe that the complexity of cellular and molecular organization of neural connections, or synapses, is what truly determines a brain’s computational capacity. This view is supported by findings that intelligence is more correlated with frontal lobe volume and volume of gray matter, which is dense in neural cell bodies and synapses, than sheer brain size. Other research comparing proteins at synapses between different species suggests that what makes up synapses at the molecular level has had a huge impact on intelligence throughout evolutionary history. So, although having a big brain is somewhat predictive of having big smarts, intelligence probably depends much more on how efficiently different parts of your brain communicate with each other.
As a counterpoint, rats without a cortex can do...basically everything normal rats can do--except trim their toenails. The classic reference for this is Whitslaw's 1990 chapter "The decorticate rat".
The whole nail part is basically a single sentence in the paper.
For example, decorticate rats are unable to escape narrow alleyways because they can not turn around due to their tonsils touching the walls and them being unable to ignore that feeling.
Another example is that they take a few seconds vs (!) 5 minutes to groom themselves on average.
Yes! I got interested in this when my colleague worked with a person who had an entire hemisphere resected as a teenage.
FWIW, the nail thing is a bit of a neuroscience meme. I heard--and stole--this quip from multiple people in several different situations. There's also a really striking figure in that chapter (p. 7 or 8).
No argument that the rats' behaviors are affected. I suppose whether you find the slowness of their grooming expected (because of brain damage) or impressive (because it happens at all) is a matter of taste. Glass^W Skull half-empty or half-full, if you will.
The cool thing about Whitslaw's work is that it focused on natural behaviors (rather than like...a rotorod test).
I don't think he released them into the wild (would be a tough experiment with 80s tech), but there are a bunch of studies of their interactions with conspecifics. They can mate[0], though less successfully than controls, but playfight a bit better than they do[1].
> “If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side,” adds Muenke, who was not involved in the case.
Did you see the scans? The dude's head is practically empty (brain 55-75% smaller than normal) and nobody even noticed until he was 44 years old and got an MRI.
Why would you expect that, when a tiny insect can do pretty intelligent things? What "unexpected" things humans can do are probably all in the >75 IQ range.
You probably already know this (since you wrote "silly thought"), but real-life neurons are ridiculously more complex than simulated "neurons" in an NN. So the analogy doesn't really hold.
An individual biological neuron can compute a variety of functions, including max and xor, that a single perceptron can't (e.g., https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax6239 ). In general, one needs a fairly elaborate ANN to approximate the behavior of a single biological neuron.
OTOH, a three-layer network is a universal function approximator and RNNs are universal dynamical systems approximators, so they are sort of trivially equivalent.
For one they need to engage in metabolism and reproduction, but I'd like to see some argument of how neurons are more complex without those needs, e.g. do they compute some radically different class of functions than typical ANN's do, or require entirely different interconnections, etc.
You can simulate the data processing of a real neuron with 1000 digital ones, a small neural net.
I think we read too much into the complexity of biological neurons. Remember they need to do much more than compute signals. They need to self assemble, self replicate and pass through various stages of growth. They need to function for 80-100 years. Many of those neurons and synapses exist only for redundancy and other biological constraints.
A digital neuron doesn't care about its physical substrate and can be millions of times faster. They can be copied identically for no cost and cheaply fine-tuned for new tasks. Their architecture and data can evolve much faster than ours, and the physical implementation can remain the same during this process.
Really? You'd immediately recognize someone you knew for a few weeks over 20 years ago? You wouldn't need a bit to try to figure out who they are?
If so, then your memory is unusually good. I know that this is well beyond my capabilities. Nor do I have the ability to visit a place that I lived 40 years earlier and find my way around.
I think it depends on the intensity of the experience.
I recently found myself in a hotel that I stayed in as a 7-8 year old in the 80s for a particularly memorable vacation with my extended family. It was funny that I still remembered the I unusual aspects of the layout and could spot many of the changes that had been made over the years.
But if you asked me to describe someone I met for a few days in a business context in 2020, I’d have a hard time remembering detail.
How many other elephants did these elephants see in those 20+ years? It wouldn’t surprise me if that was fewer than 100. How many did they spend a few weeks or more with? It wouldn’t surprise me if that were less than 20.
There also, AFAIK, isn’t evidence they remember _all_ other elephants they’ve shared time with for at least few weeks (I certainly do not rule that out, either, given the low number they likely will meet in their life)
Aside from other points, more neurons might be better "all else equal", but there are differences between our brain and an elephant's beyond just neuron count.
It's like how just getting a bigger faster computer can help with your problem, but its less powerful than a new more efficient algorithm on the same computer.
I read on wikipedia [0] the other day a fairly disturbing statistic related to this, apparently human men have on average a ~10% bigger brain than women. It'd be interesting to know if that translates to a higher neuron count or the difference in volume is due to something else.
Probably just a consequence of overall physical size being larger. AFAIK there continues to be no evidence of a sex difference in overall intelligence, so slight difference in brain size is probably a red herring.
In particular, a given elephant might be "more intelligent" than a human -- we just happen to have evolved from a particular niche that has rendered us bizarrely good at abstracting knowledge and combining it with the knowledge of other humans.
We have very good problem solving ability of course, but a superpowered ability to ask others how they solved the problem. If we wanted to somehow define a kind of 'brain horsepower' type intelligence, it seems to me that the former is closer to it than the latter, and it doesn't seem obvious to me that humans would necessarily take the top spot. Or that there's a reasonable/ethical way to test it -- let's take a human, elephant, crow, and dolphin, raise them in total isolation from the any community to get a measure of their untrained intelligence... we might get some interesting results on intelligence, but mostly we will learn something about ballistics as some ethics review board launches us unto the Sun.
It may be hard to measure and even define precisely, but I think it's pretty clear that if we did agree on a definition in the context of this conversation it would be defined in such a way that humans are more intelligent than elephants.
I have listened to François Chollet say that all intelligence is specialized intelligence.
I suspect the question really doesn't make sense if that is true.
We just have this bias/mind projection fallacy that intelligence is a general physical property of the brain that can be measured. I just suspect this is not true.
Like athletic ability doesn't generalize well. Of course, someone not athletic at all is never going to be a great athlete in anything but it makes no sense to compare Lance Armstrong to Patrick Mahomes in some general athletic context. Putting a number on a general athletic ability index between the two would just be total nonsense.
If neural networks have shown us anything, it's that not all neurons are born the same. After all, even in nature there are multiple types of neurons.
I imagine it's 100% dependent on the cardinal rule of neural networks:
"Choice of training data is 10 times more important than the actual model."
What we have over elephants are opposable thumbs, excellent eyes, and vocal cords. And crucially, we're generally speaking pretty slow, weak and useless.
Except for our elaborate methods of I/O.
Our entire success is based on a feedback loop. "If human uses their IO this way, human will get more food."
Thus, we become ever more sophisticated at this. We are nothing if not a vehicle for using our high dexterity, low gross force, opposable thumbs in inventive ways to get food.
Plus, we have a biological imperative to pass these techniques on as knowledge.
A baby elephant can probably feed itself by eating green stuff at 1 year old (I know nothing about elephants).
A human child realistically cannot independently scrounge up enough solid food to sustain themselves, until they're what, twelve? Twenty-two? Certainly no younger than eight.
We have, almost certainly, the most useless progeny in the animal kingdom.
Hence we invest an enormous amount of time and energy in education to make them able to feed themselves.
So the tl;dr is
1) Human brains are pretty similar to the animal kingdom's.
2) Human opposable thumbs are world class. Pretty close to as good as it gets. Sight is also top notch, many animals have useless eyeballs.
3) Most human food is obtained by doing creative things with thumbs. This is very complex, and takes a lot of practice.
4) Human birth the most useless children in the entire animal kingdom. These children take decades to fully grow, hence we invest an enormous amount of time educating them in opposable thumbs.
5) Over time our education system gets better and better, and our list of clever things we can do with opposable thumbs get longer and longer.
Essentially what we have over the other animals isn't neurons.
What we have over the other animals is a data collection/cleaning/utilization cycle.
Without opposable thumbs, an elephant is probably quite envious of human writing & typing. Let's use the privilege wisely to encourage one another, teach and learn from each other, from Donald Tusk, and give a helping hand.
You can befriend corvids. Teaching them symbolic language is tricky, but they can trade and socialise and solve puzzles (if you manage to explain the puzzle).
Agreed. Not sure if the vegan replacements have the same properties (fattiness, moisture, etc.) that the recipe expects, and many vegan dishes from South/Southeast Asia and so on are delicious.
Vegan replacements work slightly differently. I think tips on how to substitute from brands and chefs are what's important to build trust in using these alternatives in recipes. We are working on introducing chef tips, will also try including tips from brands themselves.
Vim is very big, so don't learn it until you need it. For example, if you want to draw diagrams in Vim, you could certainly just add all the spaces and such yourself, or you could use `virtualedit=block` and vim will add the spaces for you. But you'd never know about the option beforehand because you didn't need it before.
I LOVE that "horror". Reminds me of some of the art I've seen on album/single covers. Any chance of letting people access that kind of intermediate step? (Though I know it's a niche as hell use case).
Ah yes, the fine line between charming anime character and lovecraftian horror
There was such popular demand for these "horror" images that we made them part of the generation in V2! If you refresh enough on the webpage, you can find some horrors!
I rolled around 40 times on the first stage and chose a horror. I skipped the second stage and didn't roll on the third stage, just chose one of the presented details. I skipped the fourth stage because I rolled maybe ~200 times and only saw around 1-2 comparable horrors.
I rolled around 100 times on the first stage and saw about 3-4 horrors before choosing a horror. I rolled about 70 times on the second stage, didn't find anything interesting, just chose a normal color palette. I rolled maybe 80 times on the third stage and chose a horror, though the results were pretty consistently horrors. I rolled around 60 times on the fourth stage and saw about 1-2 other horrors before choosing a horror.
Also, here's what it looked like after the third stage and before finishing the fourth stage:
This is interesting. It's a shame the grandparent is so binary, as if Chinese culture is a bacteria that can be purged and survive in pockets instead of something that ebbs and flows, as all cultures do.
