5 things your brain does better than a computer

[Herbalist Dr MziziMkavu]

Brains are better


For as long as computers have been around, they've been doing things better than humans. The earliest computing devices were designed to calculate numbers faster than people, and today's computers can do everything from calculating pi out to

a few billion places to rendering the latest Hollywood blockbuster onto your screen, complete with Dolby surround sound audio. Computer-aided design has allowed us to build skyscrapers thousands of feet high, submarines that can tickle the

deepest ocean's deepest depths, and this. Computers can calculate billions of operations per second and access huge swaths of information stored in memory. A computer program can defeat a grand master chess player, Jeopardy champions andtop poker players.

But all is not lost. There are still a few activities that are too complex for a computer to bash its binary way through. In those realms, humans still reign. But don't get too comfortable; computers are getting faster and smarter by the year. Here are five things that your brain does better than a computer. (Text: Shea Gunther)

Play Go


Go is a board game that was first played in China more than 2,000 years ago. It is played on a board marked with a 19x19 grid using black-and-white stones that players use to capture territory. The size of the board (19x19 creates 361

intersections) and the rules of the game (players can place stones anywhere open on the board on any move, so there's an almost unimaginable number of scenarios to calculate). In fact, there are more than 10 times more scenarios in Go than

there are atoms in the observable universe. Computers are good at handling big numbers, but that's just ridiculous. What's more likely is that humans will get better at designing computer programs that more closely replicate the human brain and its thought processes. But when that happens and the machines take over, I don't think we'll be all that concerned about losing a game of Go to a computer.

Solve crossword puzzles


In the late '90s, New York Times crossword puzzle editor and famed puzzle master Will Shortz declared that computers would never compete with humans in solving crossword puzzles. Michael Littman, a computer scientist at Duke University, picked up Shortz's gauntlet and lead a team in developing Proverb, a computer program designed to quickly solve crossword puzzles. Littman's program was entered into the 1999 Annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament and rocketed into 147th place.

It hasn't gotten much better for computer program puzzle solvers since then. Computers solve crossword puzzles by sifting through a database of known clues and answers and then doing a lot of number crunching to find the correct arrangement of words. Computers do OK when the clues match something found in their databanks but they stumble when faced with something out of the ordinary — Proverb finished near the bottom in a puzzle that involved "Spoonerisms," clues that

required the switching of initial consonant sounds. For example, "shoot the moon" begets "moot the shoon." It was never programmed to know how to handle that type of clue and fell flat on its face when asked to solve them.

 

[Herbalist Dr MziziMkavu]

Play Starcraft


Starcraft is a hugely popular real-time strategy video game that pits three races of combatants against one another in a battle for universal dominance. Each of the three races — human, Zerg (think alien/bugs from "Starship Troopers"), and Protoss (psychic humanoids with badass space armor) — have their own unique abilities that offer a beautifully balanced palette for wreaking martial chaos. Humans can play in single-player mode and fight to defeat the built-in computer AI or take to the 'Net to challenge other human players. Starcraft (and its sequel) are so popular in South Korea that top players pull in six-figure incomes and are well-known national celebrities.

Starcraft is another one of those games that offers a technical challenge to computer algorithms because of its complexity. There are nearly 100 different units and buildings that a player can choose and countless variations of upgrades and options to invest in. Top players combine lightning fast reflexes (Starcraft technical prowess is measured in Actions Per Minute or APM, how many things a player can make happen in game in 60 seconds. This video shows one Korean player hitting 300 APM). While a computer can certainly match and exceed humans in the

field of Actions Per Minute, they don't do as well when it comes to overall strategy. Computer scientists are making big strides on this front. In 2010, Spain's top player was defeated by Berkley Overmind, a computer program developed by computer science students and faculty at UC Berkeley, but computer artificial intelligence still falls short of being able to beat the top human players every time.

[h=4]Creating art
[/h][h=2][/h]Wikipedia defines art as "the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect." Humans have been creating art for tens of

thousands of years. The earliest object defined as art dates from around 75,000 years ago. While the earliest artists carved and painted their works on caves or sea shells, contemporary artists have a diverse range of mediums to choose from. Some artists use paints, others work with clay while others do their creating on computers using programs like Photoshop and Illustrator. (In a recent computer science class I took, we had to create our own works of art using Java code.)

But that last example wasn't truly created by computers; they merely facilitated its creation. Humans are still solidly superior to computers when it involves the actual creation of the work. A computer-generated piece of art is one that is wholly

developed and conceived by artificial intelligence. Researchers like Ray Kurzweil are doing amazing work with artificial intelligence that creates art, but it will be a long time, if at all, before computers are able to produce works with as much emotional and technical depth as a human.

[h=4]Writing
[/h][h=2][/h]As with the creation of art, this is another arena where humans stand firmly in the dominating position. For a computer to write a piece of fiction, a poem, or even a blog post to the same level of quality as a person, researchers will have to make some big jumps in artificial intelligence. It's likely not to happen until we reach the technological singularity, at which point all the writers we know will be forced to find work as janitors cleaning up computer server farms.

 

[Isaac Chikoma]

The brain, is very good at reasoning.

 

[nurbert]

brain Defeat Computers on thinkin

 

[simplemind]

Just wondering can we programme creativity into computers? At command run computers innovating subtle solutions to most intractable problems of our times.