I was benchmarking PCs to try to determine where to put some Chattermancy code and I started to wonder once more where we are in the unintentional technological race to build a cheap computer that can outperform the human brain. I've done this exercise a half-dozen times over the years. Here's what I found this time.

Calculating how long it's going to take for PCs to become as powerful as the human brain is easy if you can make a few assumptions.

I am made of organs, which are made of tissue, which is made of cells, which are made of molecules, which are made of atoms, which are made of neutrons and protons, which are made of hadrons, which are made of quarks held together by gluons. Atoms also have electrons, which are supposedly elementary particles that have no substructure, like quarks. But we've all heard that story before and I suspect that electrons are made up of something else. At some point, the smallest constituents of matter are always energy.