From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Thu May 01 2003 - 12:31:51 MDT
Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> ...
> Good point, but then we're now back at the thread concerning whether
> its easier for a supercivilization (individuals or clades or
> corporations) to focus on travel or complexity. You side with
> complexity. But again, I ask, is there a natural limit to complexity,
> that is, intelligence? Does intelligence have a max like lightspeed at
> 300,000 klicks per second? If it does, do you think that might
> motivate the brightest brains to travel? Travel for new materials, new
> territory, isolation and growth potential?
Intelligence is more difficult, but there appears to be a limit to the
ability to transmit information. It may be significant that the limit
of information containable within a singularity is porportional to the
surface area of the event horizon, but that's a tighter limit than I was
contemplating. Without speculating on more stringent conditions,
however, if energy is quantized, and space-time is quantized, then a
limit of one bit / energy quanta / minimal space-time interval seems
appearant. Now this isn't a very stringent limit, since the
quantization of space is supposed to occur at around 10^-66 cm, but if
your minimal particle is an electron, you have a much more stringent
limit.
That said, this is merely information. Intelligence requires a lot more
structure than mere information, so the limits are probably tighter.
This probably means that computronium brains will need to be organized
as clusters of clusters, and the more intelligent the required process,
the slower the computation. Thus a physical simulation could probably
be done quite quickly compared to an intelligent decision that required
an equivalent amount of processing, because the pieces of the physical
simulation could be done with a greater amount of isolation between the
components.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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