How to Calculate Thinking Speed?

Recently, more and more people are worried about the artificial intelligent will overtake the human’s wisdom. All topic will focus on one issue, how to match the speed of these two operation. For computer, we know how to calculate its speed, but for human’s mind no one has ever thought about it. Now let me show you my method. It may need some revise and supplementary I hope you may help me. I hope it will lead to a deeper discussion, not just some emotional words.

Suppose there is a spoken language, it just have two sounds (phones not syllables we may regard syllable as combination of sounds) A and B, we know, it can express this world as well as any language (similar the 0, 1 language). Yet, its expressing speed is too slow. For instance Tom uses this AB language, Jack uses a natural language with 400 sounds, supposing there are only 400 things that required to be named, then sometimes, Tom has to use 9 sounds (as ABBABBAAB) to express one thing, while Jack use 1 sound to express the same thing.

Since each sounds cost the same time, then the difference is during the whole life, Tom can only enjoy 1/9 of Jack’s information (including speaking and hearing). Or we may say that the AB language user has to have nine lives to get the information that a natural language user got in one life.

Yet in the world, the quantity of sounds in every language is different. So just counting the number of sounds in each language, we will found the different efficiency of them. In other word, languages in the world is not equal.

Since the thinking speed is a sort of ‘speaking in mind’, so the speed of speaking reflects the speed of thinking, we may roughly calculate the thinking speed in this way, of course a parameter may be introduced. 

This idea tells us that the development of any language is in fact finding more distinguishable sounds. Since all language towards this target, we may united them into one language by good guide, in future.

We always worried about the fast developing speed of computer, yet no body care about the speed of human’s mind is developing too.

Exponential function tells us in computer the base number is settled as 2 (0, 1), so we can only increase the exponent number per second to accelerate its speed. For human being, every second we can only send 5 to 6 audible sounds, so the exponent number is settled, the only way to accelerate our communication speed is increase the base number that is the species of sound. In computer, every operation means choosing 1 from 2, but in a human language with 400 sounds, every operation is choosing 1 from 400. Comparing the in used sounds for various language we may get some imagination.

The ancient Phoenician using 22 sounds, the Japanese using around 100 sounds, the English using around 400 sounds and Chinese Mandarin using 1186 sounds.

When, I list this, many people will ask two questions: 1st, how can the Mandarin has so many sounds? The answer is easy, for it is a tone language, just think about when you sing a song, you can utter every syllable according eight or sixteen different music notes that is tone. It also makes phonetic difference in speech. The 2nd question, is that the Chinese Mandarin has a faster thinking speed than English? That is not true. Unlike computer, in human’s mind, thinking speed and memory is a dynamic balance. High speed language can consume some speed to get larger quantity of memory but low speed language can’t. The Chinese language has consumed its speed for memory. So, today English using one million words to express the world yet the Chinese people using three thousand characters to express the same world.

How the expressing speed transformed into memory? To answer this question we have to explain what is sound. Sound is not syllable, a sound makes only one peak in ‘voice memo’ of your mobile. While a syllable may cause more than one peak. Try the syllable ‘sprint’, it will show three peaks. For English speaker, every second uttering 5 sounds mean the expressing speed is 400 to the 5 power per second, it is quite a big figure. Since every language is in taking more species of sounds gradually, the thinking speed is increased too.  Normally, a sound is made by ether a consonant, a vowel and tone or a vowel and a tone. Any way, it has to have a vowel and a tone.

Now we explain how the expressing speed can transform into memory. The example is the word ‘alto’, in the dictionary we found the annotation is “lowest female voice”. Then why we don’t use this phrase to stand the meaning of ‘alto’ but to create a dictionary to explain it? The only reason is that the phrase cost too much sounds, lo-we-s-t-fe-ma-le-voi-ce, nine sounds while a-l-to cost three sounds; the gap is six sounds. If in a theatre someone using this meaning 100 times per day, it cost him 600 extra sounds. But in Chinese Mandarin, they did use the phrase stand this word, for each of the three words of “lowest female voice”, expressed by one sound as ‘nu gao yin’. In that way the expressing speed transform into memory. Or we may say, they don’t need to know a word as ‘alto’ but they can express and understand its meaning as well. It similar the computer transfer a subroutine.

When human cognize a word, they don’t like computer, that remember it immediately. People understand a word by meet it repeatedly and getting impression step by step. Between two times, many things may happen upon this person. That is to say, the second time meet the same word it will recall him a different feeling compare with the first time. This phenomenon caused the imagination and inspiration of human being. This process is unlike to happen in computer. And until now the computer didn’t have even one word like this in its mind.