From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Tue Jan 15 2002 - 23:29:28 MST
On 1/15/02 6:33 PM, "J. R. Molloy" <jr@shasta.com> wrote:
> From: "James Rogers" <jamesr@best.com>
>> While sentience may be emergent, massive parallelism will have nothing to do
>> with it. The brain is massively parallel because it was convenient in the
>> evolutionary scheme of things, not because it is of intrinsic importance to
>> sentience. Anything doable in massive parallelism is doable on a serial
>> (i.e. "less massively parallel") processor.
>
> Perhaps so...
> We don't *know* yet, because serial processors have yet to claim that they are
> sentient.
Huh? My point was that all programs expressible on a parallel system are
expressible on a single processor system. Magic doesn't happen when n>>1,
any more than when n=2 (where "n" is the number of processors) compared to
when you only have a single processor.
If you can't do sentience on a serial processor, massive parallelism won't
help you in a meaningful way, other than potentially giving a bit more
processing power of a largely uninteresting sort.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 13:37:34 MST