Re: The Singularity

Hara Ra (harara@shamanics.com)
Sun, 12 Jul 1998 02:23:44 -0700

Gene says:
>I am very heartened with the promise of evolvable hardware (EHW), GA
>acting upon (analog) FPGA. This
>
(list of desirable attributes)
>
>With some effort, today a more or less clever hacker could build a Wintelian
>(that will take care of 90% of everything) worm, packing constructive
>buffer overruns together with an IP scanner. As IP addresses of PPP
>dialup accounts are typically world-visible, you could participate in
>the fun. The worm will not be able to do anything very constructive,
>but only because current computer performance and networking
>bandwidth is so very pathetic and the state of the art in GP is
>in statu nascendi.

The bigger, faster, louder is better meme has been around for a long long time.... If you take a dog, upload it and run it at 10^6 that of realtime, you have a very fast dog, but it still is a dog. I think we have a lot to learn before a SI becomes feasible.

I note these days with dour pleasure that the hardware has gotten so much ahead of the software that most folks like 266 Mhz $1000 Wintel boxes so the PC more (everything) to run (huger and huger) bloatware trend is less now.

Someone with better data that I have (John Clark?) might think about how many machine cycles are equivalent to evolution of human beings from archaeobacteria,
as this might provide a clue as to just how fast the hardware must be to create
an SI from evolutionary principles. I sort of doubt it is less than say 10^50 operations....?? 

O--------------------------------O 
| Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> | 
| Box 8334 Santa Cruz, CA 95061  |
|                                |
| Death is for animals;          |
| immortality for gods.          |
| Technology is the means by     |

| which we make the transition. | 
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