While today's digital hardware is extremely impressive, it is clear
that the human retina's real time performance goes unchallenged.
Actually to simulate 10 milliseconds of the complete processing of
even a single nerve cell from the retina would require the solution
of about 500 simultaneous nonlinear differential equations 100 times
and would take at least several minutes of time on a Cray supercomputer.
Keeping in mind that there are 10 million or more such cells interacting
with each other in complex ways, it would take a minimum of 100 years of
Cray time to simulate what takes place in your eye many times each
second.
-- John K. Stevens, Reverse Engineering the Brain
-- Byte magazine, Page 287, April 1985
Related:
COME FROM n.
A semi-mythical language construct dual to the
`go to' COME FROM <label> would cause the referenced label
to act as a sort of trapdoor, so that if the program ever reached
it control would quietly and automagically be transferred to
the statement following the COME FROM....
brute force adj.
Describes a primitive programming style
one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing
power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the
problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive
methods suited to small problems directly to large ones....
