Thomas Palef made a game so simple that it can't possibly be challenging, right? Wrong. Almost Pong has the same goal as Pong, in that you are batting a ball back and forth between two paddles (yeah, like ping pong). The difference is that there's only you, and only one button, which is your spacebar or your mouse. There's not even a start button. The kicker here is that you are playing as the ball.
While the instructions and gameplay are simple, you have to adjust your reflexes from the paddles to the ball, which might take a couple of rounds. Oh, yeah, you do not have control of the paddles. They will move at random, but so far they have given me plenty of warning. That might change if you play for longer than I've managed to. Almost Pong is mindless but simple fun, at least at lower levels. -via Kottke
Comments (1)
Wait, if I remember...
It emphasizes how pitifully little of our brains we utilize on a regular basis.
What I usually got back was a strong sense that somehow the brain just doesn't work this way. That memories and working memory aren't measurable in bits, and thinking isn't measurable in numbers of logical operations or big-O notation.
I'm glad to see a more numerical answer to this kind of question, even if it is (necessarily) very approximate.
Sorry, typing fail
Actually, there are over 100 Billion neurons in the brain and since the connections for each neuron multiply exponentially (eg. 2 neurons connect twice, 4 neurons connect 64 ways, 8 neurons connect 32,000 ways, etc.) After all is said and done, there are more possible synaptic connections in the human brain than there are particles in the known universe. Far, FAR more than a trillion which really is quite meager compared to the numbers we are talking about here.
It emphasizes how pitifully little of our brains we utilize on a regular basis."
I love this myth that we don't use the considerable amount of our brain capacity. Abstract thought of even the most basic sort is the result of the carefully controlled cooperation of numerous disparate regions of the brain. Our brain don't just have huge dead zones.
As for this romantic idea of the autistic savant, it's also silly. The normal human brain receives and processes a massive amount of data every second. It discards the input it deems irrelevant and focuses on the most important. If it didn't, you would be overloaded constantly with trivial, distracting information that impaired your higher functions. This is essentially what disables the autistic. While they may like Temple Grandin be geniuses about very specific topics, they are unable to function on more abstract levels such as comprehending social interaction.