On Sun, Jun 17, 2007 at 02:37:22PM -0300, Lúcio de Souza Coelho wrote: > Given the ever-distributed nature of processing power, I would suspect > that a superAGI would have no physical form, in the sense that it
Why is that people always use the singular? A rather strange collective glitch in the perception, it seems. > would be distributed across many processing nodes around the world. If a logic circuit processes data which is not local, it need to request that data, by sending a message through a relativistic channel, and receive that data through same. This takes time. In fast systems the gates and bits need to reside close, preferrably the data should be already there. Because of this an optimal configuration is a sphere of identical computational cells where the state resides inside the cell. If you can't cool the system by heat conduction (even isotopically pure diamond or SWNTs has its limits), you need to arrange for a coolant flow, removing the heat from the volume. The cooling channels dilute the concentration of the circuitry in the volume, making average distances longer and hence signalling slower. It is possible to have very large hierarchical systems, potentially spanning astronomical distances, but made from modules which operate at deep ns scale, or much faster, given extremely speculative computational substrates. > (And those could be computer clusters, single personal computers, and > so on - if you want to stick to physical forms, probably we are Of course you have to stick to physical forms -- there's no evidence computation can be divorced from condensed phase. > talking about zillions of boxes of many sizes and shapes.) And despite Planet surface, or space? Planet surface would probably look like an impossibly lush, alien jungle. Circumstellar volume, a cloud of orbiting islands of above. Deep space, assemblies rotating around own gravity center, possibly with an artificial star inside. > being "formless" it would be omnipresent, in the sense that it would > be able to access zillions of sensors (and possibly actuators), from > street surveillance cameras to radiotelescopes. It would look like nothing you would recognize, and the functions would be completely opaque, but for a few exceptions. The environment is likely to be extremely to mildly hostile to an unprotected mammal (examples, UHV, some 700 K temperature, or few K, intense EM radiation, presence of machine-phase scavengers). ----- 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/?member_id=4007604&user_secret=7d7fb4d8
