On Thu, Dec 10, 2015 at 11:59 AM, spudboy100 via Everything List < [email protected]> wrote:
> > Certain computer scientists have already scoffed at this development as > not being accurate. I hope it is accurate, because the species needs all > the help it can get to survive. At best it is a hybrid, > quantum-conventional computer. The road to any kind of good singularity > seems to be very long, and I ponder if there is some unappreciated > development in computer engineering and materials science that could > catapult us where we need to go, instead of the quantum? > There could be a software breakthrough. Most mathematicians think that P is not equal to NP but it has never been proven, if they're wrong and they are equal then you wouldn't need a quantum computer, a regular computer could do just as well, it just needs the right algorithm. P means a problem that can be solved in polynomial time, that is as a problem of size X gets larger the time needed to solve it increases proportionally to X^n where n is a constant and not as n^X which would be much more difficult. NP stands for "nondeterministic polynomial time" it is a class of problems that are hard to solve but if I gave you the answer it would be easy for you to check and see if my answer was correct. For example it's hard to factor large numbers but if I gave you the factors it would be easy for you to multiply the number together and see if I was correct; but if P=NP then then the two are equally easy to solve we just haven't found the right algorithm yet, but as I say P is probably not the same as NP. Some problems are of a class that is even more difficult to solve, for example finding the shortest route connecting the 48 capital cities of the lower 48 states of the USA; even if I gave you the answer it would be very difficult for you to know if I was correct or not and prove there wasn't a shorter route. Even a Quantum Computer couldn't help you with these sorts of problems, it's much harder than protein folding, even nature can't solve them so they are of little interest to physicists. As for hardware advances, Ray Kurzweil estimates that the human brain has about 10^13 bits of memory and can perform about 10^16 calculations per second, and with nanotechnology by 2045 even without quantum computers you could purchase enough hardware to simulate one billion human brains for about $1000. And that's why he calls it a singularity. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
