From: Eugene Leitl (Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de)
Date: Sun Jan 27 2002 - 14:38:02 MST
On Sun, 27 Jan 2002, animated silicon love doll wrote:
> some things here go over my head, but until now i don't think i've
> seen anything that i just completely don't get. so. what's a GOP?
> unless you're talking about 2 republicans full of braindead sequential
> operations...
oh, a GOPS is a Giga Operation Per Second. 1e9, 1000000000, one billion
shiny funky CPU operations of second. Modern CPUs are capable of several
GOPS.
> slightly less important, but on a similar note, could anyone give me a
> precise definition of computronium?
computronium is a molecular crystal, its elementary cells being little
primitive computers (each just capable of communicating with it's
neighbours, and only keeping track of a few bits). it is a hardware
implementation of a particular cellular automaton, and it is provably the
most efficient computer which can be built from matter. basically, it's a
chemical substance (not an element, as the name would seem to imply, that
would have been *too* easy) that forms a very powerful computer, if
crystallized.
now, you're probably going to ask what a cellular automaton is....
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