"Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com> writes:
> For what it's worth, my guess is that there will not be duplicated
You must factor robustness into efficiency. Having just one copy of
each algorithm is a bad idea if there is any risk of it being damaged
or unavailable (which can be a big problem for a distributed mind;
"Darn! I need my low temperature manipulation skills, but I left them
in the outer solar system!"). Another factor to think of is
evolvability: is the system designed from scratch, or the result of a
combination of many systems? You cannot just ignore legacy systems,
and having a non-modular system makes change very hard.
> calculations or module-based programming, at least if efficiency is being
> maximized.
You don't find any monoliths in nature.
> Two things to consider:
> 1) There's a lot of duplicated processing in the human race. Is it really
> necessary to have five billion copies of the walking algorithm?
Yes, unless you want that a communications glitch with the central server makes us all temporarily handicapped.
> 2) Ideal efficiency requires that there be only one Post-Singularity Entity,
> among all the races of all the Universes.
Sounds Tipleresque. But efficiency for what end? If the goal is not well-defined or requires complex information top-down solutions like you propose tend to be inferior to bottom-up solutions, even if they involve a high amount of redundancy and diversity.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y