arthur c clarke usually has good things to say...

OneWorld South Asia - Humanity will survive information deluge – Sir Arthur C Clarke

Decius wrote: ^

My current understanding and knowledge of computers isn't great enough for me to fully understand the phenomena and mechanisms that occur deep behind the layers of functioinal abstraction. The most interesting things that I have read though are about massively parallel machines which perform many operations simultaneously, like daniel hillis's connection machine, and of course using nature's spectacular magic massive search algorithm, evolution, to design computers.

I remember reading de garis mentioned that the "trillions of trillions" of times smarter computer would need to be about the size of an asteroid. His simile was that these "artilects" would be to us, in terms of advancement, as we are to a single celled organism, possibly indifferent to our pathetic meaningless fate. The only way I can imagine these machines having any "desire" to do anything would be if they were created with artificial evolution and thus their core architecture would be made of replicating entities that were selected just by somehow being successful at replicating. This would possibly make the artilects evolve "curiosity"; maybe curiosity would be fit. What I mean is that it seems if a super intelligent asteroid conglomerate without replicating entities (evolution) at it's core, would just float around not caring about anything. It would have no inherent ambition. The only reason people bother doing stuff is they have evolved a sense of pain and reward, ie for getting injured or mating respectively, which were successfuly replicating geneplexes. It might be extremely immoral if massively intelligent computers created in the future with artificial evolution evolve a sense of pain (as it would maybe make them more fit), perhaps unprecedented pain in proportion to their unprecedented intellects.

An artilect might be built with or evolve it's own phenotypic telescopes to observe the universe but why would it "want" to do anything, such as travel to other planets if it didn't have an innate urge to replicate? It wouldn't have an underlying construction which made it ask questions or care about answers because it wouldn't have evolved a sense of curiosity. If an artilect is just floating around up in empty space though, there is really quite a lack of a stimulating environment. There's no sound in space so all the environmental input of 1's and 0's or whatever would probably be from light from stars and planets. It could be that such artilects would already have an incomprehendably large knowledge base and would just sit there playing around with it in their own "heads". The lack of a stimulating environment wouldn't seem to provide selective pressure... unless the artificial evolutionary mechanisms operate in some bizarre internal way where somehow selection occurs without the need of an environment. It's not like they're swinging around in trees engaging in complex social intercourse. Or maybe the necessary environment is contained w... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

RE: Intel scientists find wall for Moore's Law | CNET News.com

lclough wrote:
] ] Moore's Law, as chip manufacturers generally refer to it
] ] today, is coming to an end, according to a recent
] ] research paper.
] ...
] ] Resolving these issues is a major goal for the entire
] ] industry. Under Moore's Law, chipmakers can double the
] ] number of transistors on a given chip every two years,
] ] an exponential growth pattern that has allowed computers
] ] to get both cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
]
] Moore's law hits a wall at about 2021, when fundamental
] physics prevent devices from becoming any smaller. After that
] it will
] be ncessary to take other steps (larger chips, 3D chips?) to
] continue the performance increase.

I'm not sure if you've heard of adiabatic computing, but here's a wired.com link about it which might affect moore's law: http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,61118,00.html
Hugo de Garis called reversible (adiabatic) computing "the greatest of the scientific discoveries of the 20th century."
Actually, they mention adiabatic computing in the link you provided in this paragraph:
"One extremely theoretical potential idea is to reuse electrons. In current architectures, electrons travel from a source to a drain and then are destroyed. With recycling, "you simply transfer the electron to something else," Gargini said. "You can make a lot of calculations without destroying the electrons." "

Hugo De Garis also predicts computers will become "trillions of trillions" of times more powerful than the human brain using molecular electronics, a subfield of nanotechnology. Actually, I think he mentioned using quantum mechanics to do this or something, but I can't make heads or tails of quantum mechanics. When first starting to read about it, I almost dismissed it as some strange meme in science, an idea that was successful at replicating whether or not it was credible.

RE: Intel scientists find wall for Moore's Law | CNET News.com

Art Center College of Design and CalTech (both here in Pasadena, CA) teamed up and created "NEURO", a small but amazing exhibit I visited this weekend.

In "Body Electric" you enter a small, darkened room and you see a rough body image of yourself in two large screens. It looks something like a heat sensor pattern, but the colors change occasionally. There are strange sounds that are attached to your movements and at some point a floating diamond begin to both follow and react to your motions. By positioning yourself correctly in relation to the diamond in 3 dimensions, you are able to destroy it with a shattering sound. It is less gamelike and more immersive, dancelike than it sounds.

The exhibit "Cheese" uses several screens of actresses who are told to smile convincingly into a camera for upwards of an hour and a half. A computer is monitering their facial dynamics and a light bar beside each screen indicates how sincere the computer believes each face is. It is absolutely fascinating to watch and see what the machine is using to judge. There are time when the frozen boredom in the smile is completely obvious to a human, only to have the machine give it a high score. As the women take breaks and stretch, you see the machine diminish their credibility.

Another exhibit was something inexplicable involving a tank of real fish, a compter generated tank of fish on a wall and tracking software.

Well worth seeing if you are near Pasadena in June.

Mix Together Artists and Scientists...

] The brand new "Big Mac" supercomputer at Virginia Tech
] could be the second most powerful supercomputer on the
] planet, according to preliminary numbers.
]
] Early benchmarks of Virginia Tech's brand new
] supercomputer -- which is strung together from 1,100
] dual-processor Power Mac G5s -- may vault the machine
] into second place in the rankings of the worlds' fastest
] supercomputers, second only to Japan's monstrously big
] and expensive Earth Simulator.

It was relatively inexpensive, too. $5.2 million. Theoretical peak performance is 17.6 teraflops. The developers are hoping to achieve 80% of that performance.

Update on TechWeb at http://www.techweb.com/wire/story/TWB20031105S0011

The significance here is the steep drop in computing resources available for solving large problems. How many problems become economically tractable if there were a bunch of computers like this available to industry and academia?

Wired News: Mac Supercomputer: Fast, Cheap

Terrific introductory book about computers. Petzold assumes the reader knows nothing and explains everything in a clear simple way from the very bottom level of functional abstraction up, in a building logical progression. Learn how bar codes work, how a lightbulb (or other output) can "answer" which switches are closed in a circuit, what "and" and "or" gates are and how to use these to build more complicated gates, and how to build a binary adding machine.

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold