[extropy-chat] Space: The Final Constraint

[Eugen Leitl]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2006 at 04:34:52PM +1000, Harry Harrison wrote:

> > One more bad thing: evolutionary systems optimize for
> > Ops/s, not Ops/J.
> 
> I don't follow your reasoning. Most creatures seem to be in
> Ops/J mode with move to Ops/s for combat in order to gain or
> prevent loss of J.

Predator/prey dynamics constantly ratchets up the processing
speed at a given energetic budget (starvation cycles included)
and processing speed of biological tissue (which plateaued
at ~120 m/s with the current substrate, and is highly unlikely
to change dramatically upwards in those ~500 MYrs this planet is
fit for biology). If you're too slow, you lose your life, 
not just your Joules. Thus being too slow when it really matters
thoroughly vacuums the gene pool.

Predator/prey co-evolution dynamics aside, social animals 
have a given interaction rate, which you need to be able to 
follow in order to be part of the hierarchy. You don't want
to trail the cool kids, in fact you'd want to be quicker than
the cool kids if you want to track what they do. Iterate.

If you're a population of social animals with a knob to 
frob your native processing rate ad libitum (within the
energetic envelope) you will find that group pressure will
cause the knob to be maxed out before very long. If you're
directly powered by the solar output, or make your own
power, then the interaction rate is limited by the processing
speed of the substrate, and thus effectively heat removal
rate from a computational volume.

Unfortunately, this wreaks havoc to long-term thinking such
as maximizing Ops/Joule over lifetime.

-- 
Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org
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