Zero Powers wrote:
> Maybe I'm dense, but it seems to me that if the attacker has *replicating*
> bots, your shield would have to be so tight as to prevent even a single
bot
> from getting through your defenses. Because if just *one* gets through,
it
> can fairly quickly become billions. And then you are in trouble, no?
That would only be true if you were trying to put a hollow shield around an
undefended lump of resources. In reality your shield would not be hollow,
so sneaking past the perimeter doesn't make an intruder safe. It has
another chance at being detected every time a sensor bot happens by, which
is likely to happen many times per second. Also, keep in mind that nanobot
replication takes a lot longer than a duel between two nanobots (probably
tens of seconds vs. milliseconds), so it can't expect to manufacture
reinforcements quickly enough to make much difference.
Defending inert matter, or even appropriately designed macro-scale
machinery, isn't a big deal. The hard problem is defending delicate,
hard-to-upgrade territory like a human body.
> And how would you possibly build a shield so tight that not a single
> attacker could get through without turning every available atom into part
of
> your shield?
A thick wall of any reasonably inert material, watched by a sensor/repair
network capable of detecting millimeter-scale activity, should do the job
quite nicely. After all, a nanobot can't carry enough onboard energy to
dissassemble any significant amount of matter unless the reactions involved
are exothermic.
Don't fall into the trap of thinking that all problems must be solved using
nanobots.
> That seems like a big if. How can you be confident that the "good guys"
> will have such a huge disparity in their favor?
It is a necessary consequence of the assumption that the intruders will be
undetected until they reach you. A diffuse cloud of drifting bots might
sneak up on you, but a dense swarm of them is easy to spot. If you can see
them coming you can kill virtually all of them with macro-scale weapons,
leaving only a few ragged survivors for your nanobots to fight.
Billy Brown
bbrown@transcient.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Jul 27 2000 - 14:06:12 MDT