[extropy-chat] Desirability of Singularity (was Are ancestor simulations immoral?)

[Eugen Leitl]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 06:08:42PM -0400, Martin Striz wrote:

> Gotcha, so you're assuming a computational substrate that has zero
> energy demands other than for information erasure according to the
> Brillouin inequality.

You don't have to erase bits. That's what reversible computing is all about.
 
> Understood now, but what's the point?   To say that evolution is X%
> inefficient with respect to some idealized (and impossible) substrate
> is rather uninformative.

Why on earth "impossible"? All of technology used to be impossible,
quite a short while back.
 
> Are you trying to use that as a canonical  metric for comparing any
> future computational substrate?   A perfect computational substrate,
> i.e. one that also has zero information erasure, runs on zero energy.
> :)  Have I said anything interesting?

No, you can come quite close to zero energy. In practice, perfectly
reversible means slow, and perfect doesn't exist.
 
> I thought a useful calculation would be to determine how efficient you
> could make cells for computation, but that of course is unknown.
> Neurons, as it happens, are probably greater than 90% efficient with
> respect to /their design/, i.e. there's little heat loss.

Neurons just happens to be cells with a pretty high metabolic rate.
Calling them optimal in regards to computation is a pretty weak joke.

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