[ExI] cool! locals create circuit board modeled on the human brain

[spike]

From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of William Flynn Wallace
Sent: Saturday, May 03, 2014 11:50 AM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] cool! locals create circuit board modeled on the human brain

 

>>…Indeed.  We want the computer to do far more than our brain is doing.

 

>…How is it better to have one computer do thousands of things at one time versus several computers dedicated to doing one thing well?

No need to choose.  Have one computer that does thousands of things at one time and does them all well.

 

 >…Seems you'd have a nightmare to debug one doing so many things?

Each routine is debugged individually.  Computers multitask very effectively.

 

>… (no one yet has answered my question about a computer programming itself)  bill w

BillW, the very first version of Excel macros by Microsloth (from 1993) allowed recursive algorithms and self-modifying code.  One could accidently write a virus; I did.

Over the years, Microsloth has intentionally defeated the features that allowed self-modifying macro code, since plenty of people got themselves in trouble with that early version; it had no guardrails.  You could generate files automatically, which could fill your hard disk quickly for instance.

I have the notion that to have software program itself requires removal of those guardrails.  We might use something like Excel version 5 to do something like that.  Have we any Excel 5 gurus left among us?  Has anyone here tried to run that on a modern platform?

We have script-gurus here who can tell us what are the modern capabilities of self-modifying code.

spike

 

 

 

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