> Jonathan Standley wrote: > > Now here is my question, it's going to sound silly but there is >> quite a bit behind it:
> > "Of what use is computronium to a superintelligence?" > If the superintelligence perceives a need for vast computational > resources, then computronium would indeed be very useful. Assuming > said SI is friendly to humans, one thing I can think of that *may* > need such power would be certain megascale engineering projects. > Keeping track of everything involved in, for example, opening a > wormhole could require unimaginable resources. (this is just a wild > guess, aside from a Stephen Hawking book or two, I'm rather clueless > when it comes to quantum-ish stuff). OK, that is a reasonable answer however I can't immagine even a dycen's sphere (assuming it had a sufficiently regular design) would require much more than what would fit on my desk to work out. > The smaller, more compact the components are in a system, the closer > they can be to each other, reducing speed of light communications > delays. By my reasoning that is the only real advantage of > computronium (unless energy efficiency is an overwhelming concern). Ofcourse, there's your tradeoff. It would seem that this would place an upper bound on how much matter you would want to use before communication delays start getting really annoying. (and hence cause the evil AI to stop after consuming a county or two). > Imagine if one could create a new universe, and then move into it. > This universe would be however you want it to be; you are omniscient > and omnipotent within it. There are no limits once you move in. In > some sense, you could consider making such a universe a 'goal to end > all goals', since literally anything that the creator wishes is > possible and easy within the new universe. A few people would find that emotionally rewarding. As for me, I rarely play video games anymore. In the past I have found that the best games, such as Dragon Warrior [sometimes Dragon Quest] IV required only 800kb and provided a rich and detailed world on only an 8-bit processor with hardly any ram. On balance, this idea is, practically speaking, pointless. It would be much cheaper to deploy technology in this universe and tweak it as you like. On a more personal note, when I was a little kid I once (maybe a few times) had a dream where I had managed to escape into a metaverse which had the topology of a torus and was somewhat red in color... In this metaverse I could "Reset" the universe to any pattern I chose and live in it from the beginning in any way I chose. Anyway, that's waaay off topick... > Assuming all the above, the issue becomes 'what resources are required > to reach the be-all end-all of goals?' I don't beleive any such goal exists. > All of the energy of the visible universe, and 10 trillion years could > be the minimum. Or... the matter (converted to energy and > computational structures) that makes up a single 50km object in the > asteroid belt could be enough. At this point in time, we have no way > of even making an educated guess. If the requirements are towards the > low end of the scale, even an AI with insane ambitions to godhood > wouldn't need to turn the whole solar system into computronium Now this gets interesting. Here we need to start thinking in terms of goals: A fairly minimal goal system would be to master mathematics, physics, chemestry, engineering, and a number of other diciplines and have enough capacity in reserve to persue any project one might be interested in, mostly having to do with survival. Depending on your assumptions about the efficacy of nanotech, such a device wouldn't be much bigger than the HD in your computer. If one wanted to start doing grand experaments in this universe, such as probing down to the plank length (10^-35 M) to see if you can dig your way into some other universe you might need to build some kind of reactor that could be quite large but not be much bigger than the moon. Another method might involve constructing a particle accelerator billions of miles long to take an electron or something close enough to the speed of light to get to that scale... In that case you probably wouldn't need anything larger that jupiter to do it. Can anyone else think of any better goals? -- I WANT A DEC ALPHA!!! =) 21364: THE UNDISPUTED GOD OF ALL CPUS. http://users.rcn.com/alangrimes/ [if rcn.com doesn't work, try erols.com ] ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?[EMAIL PROTECTED]
