[ExI] Wrong frequency? Astronomers rethink where to hunt for alien signals

[John Clark]

>
> *> GLM 5.3**: If these entities think at 1% the speed of a human (meaning
> a thought that takes us 1 second takes them 100 seconds), but their
> operational lifespan is 10,000 times longer (say, 800,000 years instead of
> 80 years) [...]*


*I don't think GLM 5.2 is playing fair. Why would their operational
lifespan be 10,000 times longer but their speed of thought be only 100
times slower when they both depend on the same physical phenomena? And
besides, the relevant figure is not the computational output of an
individual but that of the entire race. It took the human race about
1,000,000 years to go from finding a way to utilize fire to finding a way
to turn sand into AI computer microchips. If ET thought 10,000 times slower
it would take a race of ETs 10 billion years to do the same. And 10 billion
years ago the stars had not produced enough elements heavier than hydrogen
to make a bacteria, much less a Cro-Magnon man. *

*More generally, if you have only a finite memory and only a finite amount
of information to work with then thanks to reversible computing there isn't
a fixed tax on computation, but there is one on speed.  In real (non-ideal)
computing hardware slowing down reduces energy cost, and it takes time to
run the computation in reverse, so there isn't a fixed tax on computation,
but there is one on speed. If the AI has a finite memory and only a finite
amount of energy to work with then it could still complete ALMOST any
finite calculation, but it might take a very long time because the slower
it calculates the more efficient its energy usage is. *

*I say "almost" because if you keep going eventually you will reach a point
where you don't  have enough information in your scratchpad to be able to
reversibly compute a bit of information and therefore  would have to resort
to erasure, and erasing one bit of information costs at least k*T*ln2 of
energy where k is a constant and T is the temperature of the environment. *

*So: if your finite energy budget is above  [(k*T*ln2)* (the number of bits
you must erase)], then going slower allows you to complete the calculation,
but if your energy budget is below that floor then no amount of slowness
would let you complete the calculation. if the scratchpad is too small to
hold the garbage in it long enough to uncompute it then you simply don't
have enough information to keep the whole process reversible, and you're
forced to erase. **Slowing down lets you approach but not break through the
computational floor discovered by Landauer.*


*John K Clark*
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