[ExI] Chips The Size Of[interplanetary] Dust [and matrioshka brains]

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Sep 03, 2007 at 01:06:23AM +0100, Russell Wallace wrote:
> On 9/2/07, spike <spike66 at comcast.net> wrote:
> > I once spent a lot of mental energy trying to figure out how to do
> > station-keeping with M-brain nodes approximately the size of a dime (but
> > much thinner).
> 
> What would you see as the advantage of making them that small? Seems
> to me things are easier and more efficient if you agglomerate a decent
> amount of machinery together in a single mass, for a Dyson sphere
> maybe km-size nodes. We break things up into small units like cell
> phones because we have a particular need to make them that small, but
> when we just want total computing or other throughput we use smaller
> numbers of larger units.

Whenever the heat production in the computation volume exceeds the
rate of dissipation through the surface bounding such volume you have
to fragment into computational volumes. How large the volume can become
depends very much on the mode and speed of computation. We don't know
yet, but km^3 would seem to be on a tall side, m^3 would seem quite
doable, however, though perhaps requiring fractal cooling channels.
Buckytronics does seem to like UHV and cold, though, since collisions
degrade the operation by geometric distortions.

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