Simple estimate
Jul. 4th, 2001 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
snydersMotivated by dm_lihachev's discourse on memory.
Assume that a normal person's speach is at a speed of 120 words per minute. Assuming that each day a person hears about 4 hours of speach we get:
4*60*120 = 28800 words per day.
365*28800 = 10252800 words per year.
Thus a three-year old has heard in his life about 30 million words, 20-year old -- 200 million, 40-year old -- 400 million. This corresponds to 150, 1000, 2000 Megabytes of uncompressed text (assuming average 5 letters per word). So all things one hears/speaks/reads in a life-time fit nicely on a single 10Gb hard-disk.
Main flow of information is through vision, not hearing (it is better to see once than to hear 100 times), so what is the role of the language -- labeling-taging things? Algebra becomes much easier when convinient symbols are introduced.
[picture from the future -- talking animals][picture from the past -- sharikoff]
Assume that a normal person's speach is at a speed of 120 words per minute. Assuming that each day a person hears about 4 hours of speach we get:
4*60*120 = 28800 words per day.
365*28800 = 10252800 words per year.
Thus a three-year old has heard in his life about 30 million words, 20-year old -- 200 million, 40-year old -- 400 million. This corresponds to 150, 1000, 2000 Megabytes of uncompressed text (assuming average 5 letters per word). So all things one hears/speaks/reads in a life-time fit nicely on a single 10Gb hard-disk.
Main flow of information is through vision, not hearing (it is better to see once than to hear 100 times), so what is the role of the language -- labeling-taging things? Algebra becomes much easier when convinient symbols are introduced.
[picture from the future -- talking animals][picture from the past -- sharikoff]
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no subject
Date: 2001-07-04 06:46 pm (UTC)ßçûê íóæåí â ïåðâóþ î÷åðåäü äëÿ îáùåíèÿ, íå äëÿ âîñïðèÿòèÿ èíôîðìàöèè.
Kolmogorov complexity
Date: 2001-07-05 12:06 am (UTC)Maybe I don't understand it, but it seems to me that the Kolmogorov complexity [size of the shortest program that will generate such sequence] may only be lower (a silly program that just stores the sequence will always work, and I actually expect that this sequence is VERY redundant, so 90% compression is probably not an exhageration). I feel that you have ment something else, but I don't see how KC can capture it.
ßçûê íóæåí â ïåðâóþ î÷åðåäü äëÿ îáùåíèÿ, íå äëÿ âîñïðèÿòèÿ èíôîðìàöèè.
Yes of course, this is the primary role, or this is how it was developed. But what about science? To me sience in inseparable from the language, but maybe I am wrong. I think language is also a very important tool in the development of the information processing algorithms incide the brain. "Thinking in the language" helps to process information more efficiently. [Íî ÷òî-òî ãëàâíîå ïðîïàëî]