Your Brain is the Most Powerful Supercomputer on the Planet

Zach
7 min readOct 31, 2020

Why on Earth would you try to fight with it?

Photo by Josh Riemer on Unsplash

At the time of writing this, the most powerful supercomputer in the world is the “Fugaku” supercomputer created by Fujitsu of Tokyo Japan in June of 2020. It has a peak processing power of 513.855 petaFLOPS, which means that it’s capable of doing 500 quadrillion (10¹⁵) floating-point operations per second. For reference in terms of data storage, a Petabyte is one thousand times larger than a Terabyte and one million times larger than a Gigabyte.

This is a massively powerful computer. Capable of doing incomprehensible amounts of calculations per second. The kind of computer that is used for calculating the time, heat, energy, and velocity of the big bang. The kind of processing power that can detect the micro-anomalies of a subject’s breathing rate, posture, tone, pitch, facial tics, and body temperature when detecting lies. In short, this is not a computer that you would want to intentionally take on in a head to head battle of wits… or any kind of battle at all.

Now you may be surprised to find out that the processing power of the human brain is widely accepted to be somewhere around 1 exaFLOP. This means that it can perform one billion billion (10¹⁸) floating-point operations per second.

This means that your brain…

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Zach

USMC Veteran | Software Engineer | Entrepreneur | Contrarian Thinker & Investor — “Always evolving, ever un-evolved.” —