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Notes -
Why larger animals need larger brains to get same intelligence?
In 1960s, Harry J Jerison collected and plotted data on brain size-body size on log scale. He also calculated different fit lines for mammals, birds and reptiles, and they have different slopes, though often slope 2/3 is used for convenience.
While difference between reptile slope and bird slope is probably insignificant, between birds and mammals probably is (about 0.580 vs 0.72 IIRC).
Extrapolating from this data, a 70kg bird might have same intelligence as human with only 400g brain instead of 1400g. A card which
birdsdinosaurs didn't get to put good use for.There's a monstrously large amount of complexity in between 'size of brain', all the mechanisms of the brain, and actual intelligence, most of which we still don't understand. This isn't a great analogy, brain size does matter, but - imagine comparing transistor density to chip speed, or transistor number to chip speed, or the technology used to chip speed. These are important, but not enough to extrapolate the intelligence of a '70kg bird with only 400g brain', any more than a chip with 1 angstrom wide transistors, a car with a 10 ton engine, etc. On the other hand, many similar things can scale up simply ("a mammal with a car-sized heart", "a flying car with a 50k pound engine").
???
There are wide classes of "Embarrassingly parallel" tasks where relationship is nearly linear
Yeah, I forgot to actually make the point, was doing something else while writing that comment - whoops. The idea was that transistor density ~ things as a contingent result of a large amount of human activity, and in ways that's changed over time. like this - you can't just predict that clock speed will scale indefinitely. it hasn't! the main difference between birdbrain and humanbrain is all the stuff other than size that made humans smarter than monkeys, not size. and given the intelligence variation between similarly-brained humans, and the clear gap in human brain mechanisms and chips, there's so much technical complexity in between 'brain size' and 'intelligence', in a similar way that there is between 'transistor density' and 'some downstream effect', that it's just missing the point to say 'a 400g brain makes a bird as smart as a human'.
'wide classes' isn't 'all classes' at all, single core speed plateaued a while ago and lots of weird techniques have to be used to make single cores faster. Algorithms have to be designed for the use case parallel - GPUs use large floating point matrix multiplies because we can do those fast. One can't take, like, a web browser from 2010, and multiply by changes transistor density, and get 'how good the browser today is'. That's what doing a scaling curve between brain size and intelligence across far-separated species feels like. The things the neurons are doing are much more important than the size.
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