[ExI] Wrestling with Embodiment

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 12:44:13PM +0100, Stefano Vaj wrote:

> I am quite skeptical as the existence of forms of cognition, or any other
> information processing for that matter, that would be "hardware dependent"
> at all.

Hardwired critters, spiders like Portia which have to time-share,
metabolic constraints, computational constraints (=parallelism)
would come to mind.
 
> The real question remains however of what kind of performance hit you are
> going to suffer by running some of, or all, the relevant routines on
> "hardware" which can be much, much less optimised to do so.

In case of serial synchronous computers which attempt to
simulate asynchronous systems with trillions components
the deficits of mismatched approaches become especially
apparent.
 
> This is why, BTW, in spite of steampunk fantasies to the contrary we do not
> seriously consider the development of AGIs on punch-card machines.

The history if AI is littered with absurd pronouncements
of researchers asked how much resources it would take for
human equivalent.