Jack Ward 1/20/2003 Participation Assignment 2. Moravec's argument for his calculation is a compelling one and he is fairly convincing that computers will be capable completing the required number of instructions per second within the next fifty years. Unfortunatley I am not sure that operations per second is the final and complete indicator of the mind's processing power. The number of operations per second provides a clear quantitative look at the brains information capacity but it fails to take into account other parts of information processing such as resource allocation, information storage and, synthesis and generation. It is arguable that these like other factors in information processing are the realm of software or processing instructions but as Moravec says on page 51, 'it . . . seemed to many that existing machines were powerful enough -- if only the right programs could be found.' Moravec argues throughout chapter 2 of Mind Children, that it is not the software that is holding computers back from human equivilence but rather operation speeds. While human equivilance is unlikely to be reached by a machine with less processing power than the brain, the set of processing instructions that directs its processing power appears complex enough to assume that the efficiency of instructions has at least a minor role in information processing.