[extropy-chat] Clock rate or rather communication delays

[Eugen Leitl]

On Sun, May 07, 2006 at 10:43:31AM -0400, Keith Henson wrote:

> It *is* a way to avoid boredom while you wait for the end of the universe.

Living beings know no boredom. Co-evolutionary pressure will require
everybody running at the fastest rates (not clocks, global clocks don't
exist), after just a few iterations. Sartre would have said something
about others making you optimize for Ops/s instead of Ops/J.
 
> At warp 8 (slowing your clock by 10 exp -8) and .5 c, you can cross the 
> galaxy in a subjective 8 hours while you watch 1000 super novas twinkle.

If you're travelling at mere 0.5 c, you will be overtaken in transit
by later but faster others, and won't arrive at the target you set
out to arrive.
 
> Subjective time is an element of AIs.  If you knew how to do it at all, you 
> could implement an AI on an Apple II.  But I would not expect it to do well 

Everybody has been claiming AI needs only 5 MIPS, but I must admit 2 MHz 6502
is a genuine novelty.

> on a timed intelligence test.

An Apple ][ might not do too badly -- against a virus.
 
> The point being that speed of light and the size of processor elements 
> (ultimately the granularity of atoms) will interact to limit the largest 
> practical size of an AI's hardware.

There are always limits. Not nearly as tight limits as biology currently
suffers (~120 m/s, ~1 l, ~20 W). Superpersonal organization levels allow you
to synchronize loosely (but at a very high level), while achieving full-realtime
personal response. Including some primitive but meaningful response at the um/ps level.
 
> And I would bet that limit is a good deal smaller than Jupiter.

I'm sure procaryontes would have considered our brain something quite
impossible. Nevertheless, here we are, and busily organizing
ourselves at the ~lightsecond level, reaching out towards ~lighthour
level.

I honestly don't share your disappointment. Yes, there will be limits.
But nothing like the limits we're currently laboring under.

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