COMPARISON OF HUMAN VERSUS COMPUTER

In Table 1, we try to elaborate the differences between human and computer.

HUMAN
Strengths
1. Have common sense and bigger knowledge base, thus can percept his
environment better than computer given appropriate means (especially in visual
form).
2. Can think (synthesize) new rules out of the box.
3. Psychologically, human decision is more trusted than computer expert system
decision.
4. Can detect trends, patterns, or anomalies, in visualization data.
5. Good in learning.
Weaknesses
1. Easily tired and bored, thus can only be utilized for a short period of time,
perhaps as oracle only.
2. Cannot do micro manage.
3. Biased and inconsistent.
4. Can make error.
5. Not a perfect decision maker.
6. Actually cannot see anything if the data is presented in awkward manner.

COMPUTER
Strengths
1. Speed: Fast.
2. Reliable.
3. Endurance: Not tired.
4. Unbiased.
5. Consistent.
6. Can try much more combinations than what human is capable of.
Weaknesses
1. Difficult to synthesize new rules (cannot think out of the box).
2. Limited knowledge base.
3. No common sense.
4.

COMPUTER VS HUMAN MEMORY

Memory management is an essential skill that every programmer develops

over time. To develop that skill you need to have a sense of how computer
memory works. Surprisingly, memory is not a simple thing. It is actually quite
complex and only a few experts actually understand all of the details. In this
post, I make an analogy between computer and human memory to explain
the basics of both. This leads me to dive into the core of both computers and
human minds as these are deeply intermingled.
Memory refers to the physical devices used to store programs (sequences of
instructions) or data. Both computers and humans have multiple forms of
memory. I dont know whether human memory inspired the design of
computers but the similarities are striking as you are going to see.

RAM or Random Access Memory and the Hippocampus

RAM
When someone refers to computer memory, it usually means RAM. RAM was
designed to provide a quick access to series of numbers. To limit access time,
RAM is organized around arrays of electronic components that allow very
quick access to any location in the memory. The main advantage of RAM is
speed (typical RAM bandwidth today is around 5-10 GBytes/s). The
constraints on speed have historically limited the overall size of available
RAM on computers (today typical RAM memory is around 8 GBytes). The
main disadvantage of this form of memory is its volatility : you turn off your
computer and it is gone.

Where is the hippocampus in our brain?

Humans do have a form of RAM and it is called short-term memory.
Interestingly, short-term memory is usually associated with a very specific
region of the brain called the hippocampus. Short-term memory is the
memory you will use to recall immediate actions (like the series of words you
are actually reading).

The hippocampus by Camillo Golgi

We dont really understand how the hippocampus does it but I have always
been puzzled by this structure homogeneity. It is composed of billions of cells
that are very densely packed, like on an array as can be seen on the Golgi
staining in the attached image. Reminds you something?
It is traditionally thought that the memory content stored in the
hippocampus is transferred to another brain area for long term storage. This
process is supposedly happening when you are turned off (your sleep). Again
another similarity.

The hard drive and the cortex.

A hard drive
As for the hippocampus, RAM storage was too volatile so engineers came out
with a complimentary form of storage for long term memory in computers :
the Hard Drive or HD. Hard drive have low bandwidth (usually 100 MBytes/s)
but can store much more (computer usually comes with 500 GBytes of hard
drive). This is where all of your data and programs is located.
Human long-term memory is presumably located in the cortex, exactly why
and how is a matter of intense research nowadays. I am sure you have

experienced that recollecting old memories can take quite some time
(sometimes minutes). This process is usually variable as it is when reading
from the hard drive. Hard drive can have very different read/write speed
depending on where the memory is stored.

Long term memory is supposedly transferred to the cerebral cortex via

the hippocampus.
As for humans, when you put a computer to sleep, RAM memory is
transferred to the hard drive for long term storage. This process is reversed
when you turn it on to make the best usage of the fast RAM. I suppose the
same thing is happening when we wake up in the morning (in my case, this
process is especially slow).
So far so good. Nothing too fancy here as the distinction between RAM and
HD is usually known.
There are still 3 forms of computer memory that we need to understand, so
hold on.

CPU Cache and neuronal network attractors

Transferring memory from the RAM to the CPU cache

Computers have something called CPU cache. CPU or Central Processing
Unit is probably the main thing a computer have that we dont. This is the
center of your system where all calculations are being done. In essence a
CPU is just a ton of operators packed in a very tight space, they can combine
bits of information in very specific ways. Thanks to decades of work, CPU
operates at very very high frequencies, in the GHz range. Most CPUs are now
64 bits which means they can process 64 bits of information at each clock
cycle. Because the frequency is so high, it became essential to have a high
bandwidth to provide information to the CPU. If you check the numbers, it

appears that the RAM is not fast enough to feed these monsters (the order of
magnitude is 24 GBytes/s). Thats what the CACHE was designed for. The
total memory content of the CACHE is very small as we really want this thing
to be dead-fast (by small I mean in the MByte range). The CACHE is a very
little memory space packed at the close proximity of your CPU to limit access
times. There are multiple levels of cache (L1, L2 as depicted on the
associated image but there are more) to provide intermediate levels of
storage to make the CPU work smooth and organized.
Our brain is not clocked at such speeds. A typical neuron emits a new spike
at about 10-40 Hz. While it can go higher, we can say we have a 40 Hz clock
running in our skull. This is why our computer screens are only refreshed at
60 Hz. Why would you go faster, we dont see it

A neuronal network is a distributed cache memory

But as for more modern computer architecture, things are done in parallel in
our little head. With such a low clock speed, information is transferred very
slowly from one side of the head to the other so we cant afford to have a
single memory storage.
Indeed, Memory in the brain is distributed all other the place. I see the cortex
as a gigantic CACHE storage. Each bit of information that is processed wake
up the local neuronal network, reactivate its memory and compare this
memory with the provided input. The beauty of neuronal networks is that
both the program (what we usually script in Matlab in M-files) and the
associated memory (the program parameters or your grandmother face) can
be stored in the same place.

Protected memory and explicit memory

Human
memory
is
further
divided
into
two
major
classes
called explicit and implicit memory. Explicit memory is the memory you are
consciously using, like when you remember where you left your doors keys
the day before, while implicit memory is not necessarily conscious : you
know how to walk but you dont have to think to walk. Still you had to learn

and store it somehow. I have no idea how this separation is done at the
neuronal level but I do know that something very similar exists in computers
and its called memory protection. Memory protection is built-in in any
modern OS. When you write a program that needs some memory for its
behavior, the OS allocates some space to it. It does so with some protection
mechanism to prevent the program from accessing any other memory. This
technique obviously prevent bugs and promote overall stability of your
system. It does seem to me that explicit and implicit memory fullfill the same
purpose : stability of our brain Operating System and protection of
important memories.

Memory swapping and writing

It sometimes happens that a program asks for more memory than what is
available in the RAM. When this happen, your operating system has no other
solution than to use whats available : your hard drive. In that case, your OS
will allocate some space on the hard drive for your program to work. This is
usually refers as swapping. Since hard drive are several order of
magnitude slower, this leads to great loss in performance. This is probably
the number one reason things can go slow within Matlab. Your program will
not be able to tell if its data is stored on the hard drive or in the RAM as this
process is seemingly transparent. I personally believe that if your program
start to swap, it is because your program was not designed properly. It is
your job to be able to work within the memory limits of your computer.
Swapping does not exactly exists for human mind as our mind was extremely
well designed to work within its memory limits. However, in some ways we
do swap all the time.

COMPUTER PROGRAMMING BASICS AND DATA TYPES:

We assume you are well aware of English Language, which is a well-known
Human Interface Language. English has a predefined grammar, which
needs to be followed to write English statements in a correct way. Likewise,
most of the Human Interface Languages (Hindi, English, Spanish, French,
etc.) are made of several elements like verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs,
propositions, and conjunctions, etc.
Similar to Human Interface Languages, Computer Programming Languages
are also made of several elements. We will take you through the basics of
those elements and make you comfortable to use them in various
programming languages. These basic elements include

Programming Environment

Basic Syntax

Data Types

Variables

Keywords

Basic Operators

Decision Making

Loops

Numbers

Characters

Arrays

Strings

Functions

File I/O

DATA TYPES:

Let's discuss about a very simple but very important concept available in
almost all the programming languages which is called data types. As its
name indicates, a data type represents a type of the data which you can
process using your computer program. It can be numeric, alphanumeric,
decimal, etc.
Lets keep Computer Programming aside for a while and take an easy
example of adding two whole numbers 10 & 20, which can be done simply
as follows
10 + 20
Let's take another problem where we want to add two decimal numbers
10.50 & 20.50, which will be written as follows
10.50 + 20.50
The two examples are straightforward. Now let's take another example
where we want to record student information in a notebook. Here we would
like to record the following information
Name:
Class:
Section:
Age:
Sex:
Now, let's put one student record as per the given requirement
Name: Zara Ali

Class: 6th
Section: J
Age: 13
Sex: F
The first example dealt with whole numbers, the second example added two
decimal numbers, whereas the third example is dealing with a mix of
different data. Let's put it as follows
Student name "Zara Ali" is a sequence of characters which is also
called a string.
Student class "6th" has been represented by a mix of whole number
and a string of two characters. Such a mix is called alphanumeric.
Student section has been represented by a single character which is
'J'.
Student age has been represented by a whole number which is 13.
Student gender has been represented by a single character which is
'F'.
This way, we realized that in our day-to-day life, we deal with different types
of data such as strings, characters, whole numbers (integers), and decimal
numbers (floating point numbers).
Similarly, when we write a computer program to process different types of
data, we need to specify its type clearly; otherwise the computer does not
understand how different operations can be performed on that given data.
Different programming languages use different keywords to specify different
data types. For example, C and Java programming languages use int to
specify integer data, whereas char specifies a character data type.