How good an emulation is required?

Reading this article on requiring lots of processing power to emulate the snes accurately, made me think that we will likely have similar issues when emulating humans.

I’d imagine weird timing and chemical interactions being used by the brain as it is an adaptable system and might be able adapt to use them if they turn out to be helpful.

This suggested to me a few issues with no easy answers that I could see.

  • Is it better to emulate 1 human faithfully or 10 humans with occasional glitches (for example could no longer appreciate music in the same way)

  • How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you gave up your body.

  • How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before letting it use heavy machinery.

  • How glitch free would you want the emulation to be before you had it working on FAI.

Also please ignore the 3Ghz vs 25Mhz comparison, it perpetuates the myth that computational power is about clock speed and not operations per second and memory bandwidth.