How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed

by Ray Kurzweil

If we take the core knowledge of an expert as consisting of about 100,000 “chunks” of knowledge (that is, patterns) with a redundancy estimate of about 100 to 1, that gives us a requirement of 10 million patterns. This core expert knowledge is built on more general and extensive professional knowledge, so we can increase the order of magnitude of patterns to about 30 to 50 million. Our everyday “commonsense” knowledge as a human being is even greater; “street smarts” actually require substantially more of our neocortex than “book smarts.” Including this brings our estimate to well over 100 million patterns, taking into account the redundancy factor of about 100. Note that the redundancy factor is far from fixed—very common patterns will have a redundancy factor well into the thousands, whereas a brand-new phenomenon may have a redundancy factor of less than 10.