On Wednesday 14 March 2007 15:30, Eugen Leitl wrote: > The reason Drexler proposed scaling down the Difference Engine is not > because he considered them practical, but because they're easy to analyze.
But more to the point to put a LOWER bound on computational capacity of nanosystems. > I'm not sure why you're looking at 10^30 ops btw, my number is some 10^23. Ahh -- read you wrong; I thought you meant 1e17 sites with 1e23 ops apiece. > The point is that we don't know how exactly the brain does it, so I put > some reasonable numbers of hardware required to roughly track what a given > biological system is doing. That makes you a scientist rather than an engineer in my book. Imagine that you looked at muscle cells and didn't know that the whole business was designed simply to exert a tension along its length. Hey, maybe it's a gland for generating lactic acid, or heating and deoxygenating blood. By the time you built a machine that could duplicate all the things a muscle *might* be doing when examined at the cellular level, you'd have filled a whole industrial complex. But the engineer says, let's build a gadget that pulls, and see if that's good enough. I'm willing to bet a few year's work on my guess as to what the brain is designed to accomplish. > > Bottom line: HEPP for $1M today, $1K in a decade, but only if we have > > understood and optimized the software. > > Do you think what your brain does (what is not require for housekeeping) > is grossly inefficient, in the terms of operations, not comparisons to > some semi-optimal computronium, and it can be optimized (by skipping > all those NOPs, probably)? I'm not quite that confident, I must admit. Actually it's quite efficient compared with current technology -- remember the full rack and 10 kW for current-day equivalence. It's not that the brain is lousy -- it's the most amazing machine that exists today. It's that technology is catching up with breathtaking speed. (Ops/watt has increased by a factor of TEN in the past year.) > I'm however quite confident that there is no simple theory lurking in > there which can written down as a neat set of equations on a sheet > of paper, or even a small pile of such. So there's not much to understand, > and very little to optimize. I'll go out on a limb and conjecture that an AI can be fully described in less than a megabyte of the appropriate formalism. (Allow 10 MB if you want to implement the formalism in existing low-level languages.) Josh ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
