On 10/26/2011 6:06 AM, Eugen Leitl wrote:
On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 09:00:36AM -0400, John Zabroski wrote:
Kurzweil addresses that.
As far as I know Kurzweil hasn't presented anything technical or even detailed.
Armwaving is cheap enough.
yep, one can follow a polynomial curve to pretty much anything...
actually getting there is another matter.
Kurzweil addresses that.
Do you have literature references for that?
especially considering the context:
"another question is what can be done in the near term and on present
hardware (future hardware may or may not exist, but any new hardware may
take years to make it into typical end-user systems)."
if it can't be done on present HW, it can't be done on present HW.
much like I can't render a whole damn city-scape down to the level of
the individual pencils in the desk drawers in real-time on a current
video card, it just isn't going to work.
the other issue is the time to market cycle...
consider, for example, the Intel AVX extensions:
it was detailed out a number of years ago;
it only started coming out in real chips fairly recently;
it will likely be another number of years until most consumer systems
have chips with this feature.
and this was something trivial (adding larger "YMM" registers, and
adding instruction forms which took additional arguments).
other current/past examples would be pixel/fragment shaders:
most graphics cards now have them, but there are still some floating
around that don't.
so, it is unlikely that Kurzweil is going to be able to make the
market-cycle go away "anytime soon" (IOW: within the next several years).
the closest thing we have at the moment is software, where features can
be deployed more readily, and end users can get updated versions more
quickly, rather than having to wait many years for everything to "cycle
through".
As for biology, it is an iterative approach. The biggest insights are
coming from better medical imaging techniques that allow us to see inside
living systems' organs and better understand how they work. Kurzweil sort
of discusses this too, and relates it to how it helped him develop better
and more scalable algorithms even when the underlying hardware did not
change.
When was the last time Kurzweil did design something? 1990? Prior to that?
can't comment much on this.
_______________________________________________
fonc mailing list
[email protected]
http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
