measuring computation

Current issues:

Sebastian has brought up 2 issues:

1. Different brain regions may have greater value, potentially independent of their computational power. For instance consciousness, or a self model might have more value per computation than arithmatic portion.
2. The computational part seems to swamp out the quality of life part.

Check out

1. How to measure the computational power of a system?

https://reducing-suffering.org/which-computations-do-i-care-about/

1. See Moral Patienthood report by Luke Muehlhauser

Some possible ways of measuring this:

1. Type: Some types of computation are likely to be more valuable than others
2. Measurement of complexity Kolmogorov or compressibility
1. linkages at various scales. phenomena which emerge from a collection of interacting objects

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complexity>

1. Is complete randomness complex? No.
2. Data compression
1. Novelty
2. Duplicates matter less. The extreme are duplicates that will have no interaction with the world or each other, in which they don't matter at all.
3. Similar experiences matter less also, since they are more compressible.
4. This has large implications:
1. It implies that novelty is good, sameness is less good.
2. Equality is less good than diversity of experiences
3. Processing speed: Operations per second
1. Subjective time: Speed of processing. If two identical uploads run at different speeds then the faster one could experience more cheer
4. Connectivity, or communications internally per second, TEPS
1. Bits/sec
5. IO from external world to internal
6. Consciousness: awareness of the world that cause changes internally with internal representations.
• Integrated information theory:
• http://integratedinformationtheory.org/
• Scott aaronson doesn't like this as a measure for consciousness.
• Graph theory description of consciousness of a mind
7. Memory: memory of the past, ability to store intermediate results
1. Information in the theoretic sense. Measure of surprise
8. Efficiency at doing these
9. Uniqueness of compute and memory
10. Ability to run Valuable Programs
1. Time it takes to run Valuable Programs

How to measure computer performance?

It's often how long it takes to run the algorithm you care about. There are some benchmarks that give some indication though.

computer performance is the amount of useful work accomplished by a computer system.

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance>

• Short response time for a given piece of work.
• High throughput (rate of processing work).
• Low utilization of computing resource(s).
• High availability of the computing system or application.
• Fast (or highly compact) data compression and decompression.
• High bandwidth.
• Short data transmission time.

From <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_performance>

Duplication doesn't count as much.

Connectivity between brains:

50b/s http://150.162.46.34:8080/icassp2017/pdfs/0005625.pdf

39 bits/s https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/5/9/eaaw2594

See: IO Bandwidth of the brain IO Bandwidth Between Brains

Possible connections

Co

Possible number of states

10^10.8=6.3096E10