I agree that Kurzweil could have acknowledged P.Z.Myers’ expertise a bit more, especially the “nobody in my field expects a brain simulation in the next ten years” bit.
50 MB—that’s still a hefty amount of code, especially if it’s 50MB of compiled code and not 50 MB of source code (comparing the size of the source code to the size of the compressed DNA looks fishy to me, but I’m not sure Kurzweil has been actually doing that—he’s just been saying “it doesn’t require trillions of lines of code”).
Is the size of gcc the source code or the compiled version? I didn’t see that info on Wikipedia, and don’t have gcc on this machine.
As I see it, Myers delivered a totally misguided rant. When his mistakes were exposed he failed to apologise. Obviously, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
I agree that Kurzweil could have acknowledged P.Z.Myers’ expertise a bit more, especially the “nobody in my field expects a brain simulation in the next ten years” bit.
50 MB—that’s still a hefty amount of code, especially if it’s 50MB of compiled code and not 50 MB of source code (comparing the size of the source code to the size of the compressed DNA looks fishy to me, but I’m not sure Kurzweil has been actually doing that—he’s just been saying “it doesn’t require trillions of lines of code”).
Is the size of gcc the source code or the compiled version? I didn’t see that info on Wikipedia, and don’t have gcc on this machine.
As I see it, Myers delivered a totally misguided rant. When his mistakes were exposed he failed to apologise. Obviously, there is no such thing as bad publicity.
I’m looking at gcc-4.5.0.tar.gz.
That includes the source code, the binaries, the documentation, the unit tests, changelogs … I’m not surpised it’s pretty big!
I consider it pretty likely that it’s possible to program a human-like intelligence with a compressed source code of less than 50 MB.
However, I’m much less confident that the source code of the first actual human-like intelligence coded by humans (if there is one) will be that size.