[extropy-chat] flash crowd super computer

[Damien Broderick]

At 09:35 PM 2/23/2004 +0100, Eugen wrote:

>If you want to be able to talk any machine
>to any other without interfering, you need a lot of wire, and a big crossbar
>(or equivalent) switch. For many reasons, chiefly because of minimizing fibre
>length and because crossbars don't scale nor do long-haul protocols suit to
>switching the Internet is a (meshed) tree.
>
>If you bring many machines into one location, and make them talk pure Ethernet
>frames instead of TCP/IP over arbitrary carrier you can achieve a far greater
>bandwidth crossection (and a vastly smaller latency to boot) with lots less
>thaler$.

Yeah. But...

It depends what you want to do. If you need an AI mind as an existence 
proof and test bed, it might not matter that it runs slow. Presumably it 
will eventually re-write and iteratively optimize itself to work around the 
lags, and go on to devise nano systems able to build compact gadgets it can 
port itself to.

Granted, that's not what the teacher had in mind.

Damien Broderick