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Comment by dasboth | Hacker News Reader

Is it not possible that we could simulate a star though? Not in 2017, but at some point?

I'm of the opinion that no, we will not. The computing power required to simulate a star (or a human brain, to go back down the analogy chain) is not there and will not be there, without some quantum computing magic. I doubt the sun provides enough energy for us to fully simulate the sun.

Simply running basic neural network is slow work, even with the best supercomputers we have today. Throw in the fact that a neural network is a super simplistic model of how we currently believe synapses work, and the scale of the simulation problem gets hard, fast.

> I doubt the sun provides enough energy for us to fully simulate the sun.

That's an interesting way to put it! I tend to agree that simulating a human brain will need more than the computational resources to train a neural network with 1 billion neurons (if those resources will ever be available, which is questionable). That's not to say we won't find a way around that problem though. Of course, all the worry about a dangerous AGI hinges on this premise, and how we get there is at best unclear at the moment.

sure but we haven't even started to define what constitutes a valid simulation. That's half of the point here, we're trying to recreate something that we don't know.

That's true. The big if is whether we can ever have the resources to fully simulate the human brain. If we ever get close to that, then we can worry about the "intelligence explosion" and so on. It feels very possible that we'd work out how the human brain works at some point, though.

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