army1987 comments on Open Thread February 25 - March 3 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Coscott 25 February 2014 04:57AM

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Comment author: gwern 27 February 2014 10:55:08PM 3 points [-]

Why not simply estimate it yourself? These sorts of things aren't very hard to do. For example, you can estimate typing as follows: peak at 120 WPM; words are average 4 characters; each character (per Shannon and other's research; see http://www.gwern.net/Notes#efficient-natural-language ) conveys ~1 bit; hence your typing bandwidth is 120 * 4 * 1 = <480 bits per minute or <8 bits per second.

Do that for a few modalities like speech, and sum.

Comment author: [deleted] 01 March 2014 12:14:57PM *  0 points [-]

I've just noticed he said “an arbitrarily fast mind running in a human body”, not an actual human being, so I don't think it would be much slower at typing uuencoded compressed stuff than natural language (at least with QWERTY -- it might be different with keyboards layouts optimized from natural language such as Dvorak, but still probably within a factor of a few).

Comment author: gwern 01 March 2014 07:58:23PM *  0 points [-]

The 120WPM is pretty good for the physical limits: if you are typing at 120WPM, then you have not hit the limits of your thinking (imagine you are in a typing tutor - your reading speed ought to be at least 3x 120WPM...), and you're not too far off some of the sustained typing numbers in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_per_minute#Alphanumeric_entry

Comment author: [deleted] 01 March 2014 10:28:11PM 1 point [-]

My point was that 1 bit per character is an underestimate.