Posted by
Hemos
on from the and-irradiated-testes dept.
solferino writes: "Assume engineering genius continues to allow Moore's law to hold. What are the absolute computing limits of a 1kg laptop computer as defined by the physical laws of the universe? A New Scientist article has some interesting answers."
In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles, is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.
i don't really see any relevance to the article, i mean, it isn't feasible to use a laptop that generates that much heat, and on top of that, why would you want to compress its dimensions until it is a black hole?? i doubt we will ever need (and i may be sorry for writing this later on) a laptop with that much power. it seems that the writer had a lot of free time on their hands, and just played around with some numbers.
Re:Interesting Article, but is it useful?
by
NaughtyEddie
·
· Score: 2
Ubernewby,
Sorry to be OT, but I replied to the SynthesizerOS thread and I'd love for you to take a look. I was sick last week, so it took a while;)
--
--
It's a.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
-- Danny Vermin
Are you sure those newscientist guys aren't just reminiscing about the powerbook 5300?
Seem's like an added appendix to Making the Macintosh 1.0, soon to be renamed Breaking the Macintosh 7.5.5. . .
:)
/nutt
Back of the envelope nanocomputer numbers.
by
Christopher+Thomas
·
· Score: 5
While waiting for the article to load, I did back-of-the-envelope calculations for the performance of the best possible 1 kg computer with atom-sized features.
In case anyone else is as bored as I was, here are the calculations and the numbers:
- Assume, arbitrarily, that your device is made of carbon and has one computing element (gate or memory element) per 10 atoms, average. This gives a total of about (1000 / (12 * 10)) * 6e23 = 5e24 computing elements.
- Assume that we're going for floating-point performance, and are using most of our elements for multiplication units. Assume we're cheating and using single-precision ints (32 bits). If we're allowed to pipeline arbitrarily deeply (we're runnign a toy benchmark program), then it would take somewhere in the realm of 4000 computing elements to build an IEEE-compliant floating point multiplier. This gives us 5e24/4000 = 1.25e21 multiplication units operating in parallel.
- Assume that we're signalling using light and that the light has to travel 1 nm per clock (we're very good at routing traces). This gives a clock frequency of 3e8/1e-9 = 3e17 Hz.
- This gives us a total of 1.25e21 x 3e17 = 3.75e38 FLOPS. Less than the best, but still not too shabby.
For kicks, let's compute the power requirements of this device.
- Assume that on every clock, half of the computation units change state (we're managing to use all of the computation units all of the time, with random data). This gives 5e24 / 2 = 2.5e24 transitions per clock.
- This gives 2.5e24 * 3e17 = 7.5e41 transitions per second.
- Assume that each transiton costs about 5 eV in total (split this however you like). This gives 5 eV * 1.6e-19 J/eV = 8e-19 Joules per transition.
- This gives us a power dissipation of 6e23 watts. A bit power-hungry.
For kicks, let's compute the surface temperature of this computer assuming radiative cooling:
- Assume that our computer is a 10-cm cube, with a density comparable to that of water (this is strangely-structured carbon). This gives us a surface area of 6e-2 square metres.
- Radiative energy emission from the object will therefore be equal to 6e-2 * 5.67e-8 * T^4 = 3.46e-9 * T^4 watts, where T is the object's surface temperature.
- For a power dissipation of 6e23 watts, the object's surface temperture would be (6e23 / 3.46e-9) ^ (1/4) = 1.15e8 degrees Kelvin. A bit warm.
Summary of data for the best possible nanotech computer:
5e24 computing elements.
3.75e38 FLOPS (single-precision multiplies).
3e17 Hz.
6e23 watts.
Surface temperature of 1.15e8 degrees Kelvin.
Looks like we'd have to underclock this baby.
Derivation of computing power for a comparably-sized quantum computer is left as an exercise for the reader.
In practice, we'd probably wind up building our nanocomputers as thin films with a lot less computing power but far lower power dissipation. Possibly as nano-grains, also, depending on application.
The assumption "the more volume, the more possible positions of particles in the computer" leading to the eventual conclusion of limits on storage capacity has already been invalidated by modern science.
Apparently, infinite information can be stored in a single atom -- no joke. Check out this this EETimes article -- link courtesy of ArsTechnica.
Summary: Philip Bucksbaum from the University of Michigan has stored and retrieved eight bits of information from the quantum-phase of a single cesium atom. Theoretically, there is no limit on capacity.
In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles, is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.
If this is true and the universe is just a huge computer used in a huge calculation (who's answer is obviously 42) than just think of the uptime! Script kiddiez and administrators across the world will no longer be shoving record uptime's in each others face when god comes down and utters:
12:59AM, up 10 billion years+, 6,067 million users, load average: 2.23, 1.23, 1.20
Geoff
Hot? Try a 100MHz 486!
by
Sir_Winston
·
· Score: 2
I had a circa 1995 WinBook XP laptop I bought used a few years ago. Running Win95 with its mere 8 megs of RAM was a bit slow, but hey I'd been using old 25MHz MAcs in the computer lab, so it was faster than whet I was used to.
It had a 486DX4-100MHz processor, and...let's just say that I couldn't use it for more than half an hour without putting a pillow or book between it and my leg. I was worried that it was running too hot, but the fan was working properly, so I guess that's just how hot it was supposed to get.
So when people complain nowadays about their new laptops getting too warm or power-hungry, I laugh. Not too long ago a laptop could almost burn a hole in your pants with a battery life of only an hour. And people complain about Athlons needing too much power and producing too much heat for laptop use...
--
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
interesting article, frivolous physics
by
snarkh
·
· Score: 4
The physical computations in the article seem a little on the soft side. However it does make an interesting observation that we are still very very far from the physical limits of computational power.
On the other hand it is not clear whether such perceived limits exist in any meaningful sense and are not just reflections of our ignorance.
I recall reading about IBM building a superfast computer to model the process of protein folding
(if I remember correctly). Each such computation would take months on that (still nonexistant)
enormously fast computer. However thousands of such events occur every second in any living organism...
Re:interesting article, frivolous physics
by
gilroy
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
Like the summary I saw on the news about the ford/firestone recall: "6 million tires
have been recalled. If piled on atop the other, they would make a stack the height of the empire state building.... over
3000 times." WTF good does that do?
As a physics teacher I deal with issues of visualization a lot, and I have to disagree. Sure, 4.2e6 ft is the same as 3000 time the height of the Empire State Building. But (I would argue), contextually, they convey different information. People have a notion of the ESB as "big". It's a unit of reference for bigness. So taking their expectation of big -- the ESB -- and then saying it's three thousand times as big, conveys the overwhelming size.
Obviously, your mileage may vary, but I've found with my students that comparing things to real-world objects -- even when it simply shifts the exponent by two -- can really help them grasp the immensities.
10E10 Joules is the energy released by 1 Kilo Ton atom bomb. The 10E17 Joules listed in the article for the conversion of one KG of mass to energy would be the equivalent of a 10 Gigaton H bomb. Such a weapon would produce a fire ball about 21 miles in diameter, and the circle of total destruction from its detonation would have a radius of about 210 miles.
Assuming you were running Windows 2200 on the machine, a blue screen of death could be a rather traumatic event. In any case, Gates law tells us that this ultimate machine wouldn't be any faster than our current computers; after all, software slows down by a factor of two every 18 months also - nicely canceling out any increase in speed from the hardware.
Re:this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 second
by
gilroy
·
· Score: 2
Blockquoth the poster:
But multivac was the result of a positronic brain designing a better computer, which then designed a better one, and so
forth a few times.
Actually, I believe all that "Multivac" and "positronic" have in common is that Asimov coined them via a simple extension of a then-hip word ("Univac" and "electronic", respectively). I'm pretty sure that the Multivac universe -- to the extent that the various Multivac stories even cohabit the same universe -- is distinct from the positronic robots / _Caves of Steel_ / Foundation universe.
It is true that Asimov was fascinated by the idea of using computers to design their own successors -- something common to Hitchiker's Guide and Hyperion, as well.:)
[Sorry for any typos in this. Personally, I wouldn't want this "laptop" on my lap!]
...For a black hole with a mass of the sun, the temperature is only about ten-millionth of a degree above absolute zero...
... a black hole with a mass of only a billion tons... roughly the size of a proton - would have a temperature of some 120 billion degrees Kelvin... [This sized] black hole would release energy at the rate of 6,000 megawatts, equivalent to the output of six large nuclear power plants.
From "Black Holes and Baby Universes" by Stephen Hawking (ISBN 0-553-40663-9)
Infinite Perspective Computer
by
goldmeer
·
· Score: 2
I have to admit, that about 1/3 of the way through the article (about when the author started yammering about the computer not having any mass for non-processing parts, like that's gonna happen) I was wondering about how the computer's power supply starts the process of doing what it does. Then I got to thinking of what kind of power source could be used to provide the vast amount of disparate levels of power needed, And it struck me:
Use brownian motion from a hot cup of tea.
Douglas Adams had it all wrong when he was designing the Infinite Perspective Vortex, he was really designing the Infinate Calculation Device. (not to be confused with an improbibility generator)
When I read the article, I came to think: To what use? What would you use such a computer for? And then: To simulate a universe, or merely, to be one. During the time of the existence of the micro-black-hole-computer, nothing is input, nothing is output. Everything is input at its creation, and output at its destruction. This would be a self-contined micro-universe, with one goal: To calculate something.
At the time we create such a computer, we would be creating a universe. And our universe would then not matter any more.
Consider that our universe may be a black-hole. Maybe it is one created by someone, or someones.
Creating such a computer would be the goal of our existence, and the end of it (It would not matter anymore). Maybe history is just a long chain of such creations, inside each other?
The above text is definitely religion. But I couldn't stand writing it - the perspectives and thoughts from the article where so huge:)
-- --The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
h / (4*E) in order to get units of seconds -- Planck's is in Joule.sec and E is in Joules.
This is in fact Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to time-energy :
delta(t) * delta(E) >= h/4
I have some doubts about h/4, because it could be hbar/4 (which is equal to h/(16*PI)). But this makes almost no difference. delta(t) can be interpreted as the lifetime of the quantum state and delta(E) would be the uncertainty in the energy, which for ground state is close to the total energy and that is where this approximation comes from.
Correction - It wouldn't be a laptop.
by
w00ly_mammoth
·
· Score: 2
There's a good chance we wouldn't be using laptops so far in the future. Just imagine someone in the previous century making predictions - "People will have telegraphy poles in their homes using advanced electrical technologies, and these poles will be so light, that anybody can lift them easiy, for they will be made of miraculous substances like plastics!"
Same thing - laptops may be the gee-whiz gadgets of today, just like room size computers were in the 50s. And they are as likely to be relevant in a future using quantum technology.
I don't see why the article focused on laptops, instead of just general quantum computing. No sense of perspective. Put this in the same category as those futuristic articles some decades ago about disposable paper clothes and waterproof furniture.
The moment we exhaust the physical limitations of these three dimensions, we'll find a way to use some others. People are more resourceful than you give them credit, especially when there's a buck to be made by it.
We'll need a very large heat sink...
by
w3woody
·
· Score: 2
If this thing runs at a billion degrees, we'll need a very large heat sink. And I'll be damned if I'm putting a black hole on my lap. OTOH, there is something to be said about being able to simulate the neural net of a human being by simulating the location of every atom inside someone's head...
Watch out, you might get sucked in when you go to take your data to be processed by the black hole computer. That would really stink. I think I'll stick with my PC for now.
Are there any predictions for how large the average black hole should be? This might not make a very practical computer...
Because a computer can't contain negative energies, the spread in energy of a bit cannot be greater than its total energy. In 1998, Norman Margolus and Lev Levitin of MIT calculated that the minimum time for a bit to flip is Planck's constant divided by four times the energy.
But according to Einstein's real equation, e^2=m^2c^4 + pc^2, from which we take the square root and arrive at the equation e=mc^2 (p=0). I believe Dirac was the first to toy with the notion of negative energy (or at least question it), since the square root of a number has two answers (positive and negative).
This is good news, since it will enable Microsoft to continue to build operating systems that ccasionally crash. Granted, they will have to reprogram the error routines to include Dark Matter Underflow and Not enough matter to complete operation, but this should be trivial.
In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles, is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.
according to Einstein's real equation, e^2=m^2c^4 + pc^2, from which we take the square root and arrive at the equation e=mc^2 (p=0)
Just for those of use who are not physix geeks, what is the definition of p in the equation?
- - - - - - - -
"Never apply a Star Trek solution to a Babylon 5 problem."
-- "It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Re:Interesting Article, but is it useful?
by
uebernewby
·
· Score: 2
The computer would be interesting for super computers, but never for anything else. I don't see anyone walking around with a nuclear accident waiting to happen.
Why not?
The author calculated that, assuming Moore's law will continue to hold true, such computers would come into existence in about two hundred years. Now think back two hundred years. What was new technology then, comparable to our supercomputers? Steam engines: some advanced outlets had them, most manufacturers still used manual labor energy, water and animals. Even though the rate of technical progress has been rather slow during the past twohundred years compared to the past fifty years alone, those things have been obsolete for a long time now. You think your great^5 grandfather could imagine using *lightning* (the only form of electricity a peasant - most people were peasants back then - would have been familiar with) to light up his interior, to name but one example?
Your argument transplanted back to 1800 would run as follows:
Well, maybe they could somehow channel lightning to illuminate some big hall, such as a church or a palace, but my *house*? No way. That's just an accident waiting to happen.
We have no way of comprehending what will be possible in twohundred years time. It sucks, but face it, we'll just have to live without ever having known the good stuff.
this answer will self destruct in 10^-51 seconds
by
jesterzog
·
· Score: 2
So the ultimate laptop, one that has converted all its mass-energy to radiation, would be able to carry out a mind-boggling 1051 operations per second. Compare this with today's standard laptop, which has a clock speed of about 500 megahertz and carries out up to 1000 parallel operations each cycle--a total of about 1012 operations per second.
Um, okay.. but personally I prefer today's 1kg laptop which doesn't nuke itself and everything in a mind boggling radius to total oblivion as part of the calculation process. It's more effective for getting useful results.:)
That's not quite the point of the article though, because it's really talking about having a 1kg power source and the rest of the article seems to go into more detail.
This thing makes me think of some old Isaac Asimov stories about a supercomputer called multivac. It did heaps of cool Orwellian stuff.. like calculate crimes people would commit each day so they could be arrested before they were committed.
Where I work we had some Hitachi laptops that used to catch on fire because of some design flaw. No big deal really, nobody ever got hurt. So I can only imagine what might happen when something goes wrong inside one of these computers! I'd hate to be in the middle of typing a spreadsheet and suddenly my laptop dissappears out of existence, or worse yet, turns into a star!
Slashdot Mirror
No such thing as 'degrees kelvin' anymore. It's 'kelvins'.
What would a Beowulf cluster of these look like?
i don't really see any relevance to the article, i mean, it isn't feasible to use a laptop that generates that much heat, and on top of that, why would you want to compress its dimensions until it is a black hole?? i doubt we will ever need (and i may be sorry for writing this later on) a laptop with that much power. it seems that the writer had a lot of free time on their hands, and just played around with some numbers.
Sorry to be OT, but I replied to the SynthesizerOS thread and I'd love for you to take a look. I was sick last week, so it took a while ;)
--
It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Are you sure those newscientist guys aren't just reminiscing about the powerbook 5300?
Seem's like an added appendix to Making the Macintosh 1.0, soon to be renamed Breaking the Macintosh 7.5.5. . .
:)
/nutt
In case anyone else is as bored as I was, here are the calculations and the numbers:
- Assume, arbitrarily, that your device is made of carbon and has one computing element (gate or memory element) per 10 atoms, average. This gives a total of about (1000 / (12 * 10)) * 6e23 = 5e24 computing elements.
- Assume that we're going for floating-point performance, and are using most of our elements for multiplication units. Assume we're cheating and using single-precision ints (32 bits). If we're allowed to pipeline arbitrarily deeply (we're runnign a toy benchmark program), then it would take somewhere in the realm of 4000 computing elements to build an IEEE-compliant floating point multiplier. This gives us 5e24/4000 = 1.25e21 multiplication units operating in parallel.
- Assume that we're signalling using light and that the light has to travel 1 nm per clock (we're very good at routing traces). This gives a clock frequency of 3e8/1e-9 = 3e17 Hz.
- This gives us a total of 1.25e21 x 3e17 = 3.75e38 FLOPS. Less than the best, but still not too shabby.
For kicks, let's compute the power requirements of this device.
- Assume that on every clock, half of the computation units change state (we're managing to use all of the computation units all of the time, with random data). This gives 5e24 / 2 = 2.5e24 transitions per clock.
- This gives 2.5e24 * 3e17 = 7.5e41 transitions per second.
- Assume that each transiton costs about 5 eV in total (split this however you like). This gives 5 eV * 1.6e-19 J/eV = 8e-19 Joules per transition.
- This gives us a power dissipation of 6e23 watts. A bit power-hungry.
For kicks, let's compute the surface temperature of this computer assuming radiative cooling:
- Assume that our computer is a 10-cm cube, with a density comparable to that of water (this is strangely-structured carbon). This gives us a surface area of 6e-2 square metres.
- Radiative energy emission from the object will therefore be equal to 6e-2 * 5.67e-8 * T^4 = 3.46e-9 * T^4 watts, where T is the object's surface temperature.
- For a power dissipation of 6e23 watts, the object's surface temperture would be (6e23 / 3.46e-9) ^ (1/4) = 1.15e8 degrees Kelvin. A bit warm.
Summary of data for the best possible nanotech computer:
Looks like we'd have to underclock this baby.
Derivation of computing power for a comparably-sized quantum computer is left as an exercise for the reader.
In practice, we'd probably wind up building our nanocomputers as thin films with a lot less computing power but far lower power dissipation. Possibly as nano-grains, also, depending on application.
Of course then there is this: In the beginning there was the computer. And God said ...
Actually if you follow links from the article about hte Cray for sale... That did some protein folding calculations.
Personally, I think apple's new notebook should be a combination lunch box / notebook. Run it really hot, keep you coffee warm.
The assumption "the more volume, the more possible positions of particles in the computer" leading to the eventual conclusion of limits on storage capacity has already been invalidated by modern science.
Apparently, infinite information can be stored in a single atom -- no joke. Check out this this EETimes article -- link courtesy of ArsTechnica.
Summary: Philip Bucksbaum from the University of Michigan has stored and retrieved eight bits of information from the quantum-phase of a single cesium atom. Theoretically, there is no limit on capacity.
If this is true and the universe is just a huge computer used in a huge calculation (who's answer is obviously 42) than just think of the uptime! Script kiddiez and administrators across the world will no longer be shoving record uptime's in each others face when god comes down and utters:
12:59AM, up 10 billion years+, 6,067 million users, load average: 2.23, 1.23, 1.20
Geoff
I had a circa 1995 WinBook XP laptop I bought used a few years ago. Running Win95 with its mere 8 megs of RAM was a bit slow, but hey I'd been using old 25MHz MAcs in the computer lab, so it was faster than whet I was used to.
It had a 486DX4-100MHz processor, and...let's just say that I couldn't use it for more than half an hour without putting a pillow or book between it and my leg. I was worried that it was running too hot, but the fan was working properly, so I guess that's just how hot it was supposed to get.
So when people complain nowadays about their new laptops getting too warm or power-hungry, I laugh. Not too long ago a laptop could almost burn a hole in your pants with a battery life of only an hour. And people complain about Athlons needing too much power and producing too much heat for laptop use...
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, *The Annals*
On the other hand it is not clear whether such perceived limits exist in any meaningful sense and are not just reflections of our ignorance.
I recall reading about IBM building a superfast computer to model the process of protein folding (if I remember correctly). Each such computation would take months on that (still nonexistant) enormously fast computer. However thousands of such events occur every second in any living organism...
Assuming you were running Windows 2200 on the machine, a blue screen of death could be a rather traumatic event. In any case, Gates law tells us that this ultimate machine wouldn't be any faster than our current computers; after all, software slows down by a factor of two every 18 months also - nicely canceling out any increase in speed from the hardware.
It is true that Asimov was fascinated by the idea of using computers to design their own successors -- something common to Hitchiker's Guide and Hyperion, as well. :)
The Mongrel Dogs Who Teach
From "Black Holes and Baby Universes" by Stephen Hawking (ISBN 0-553-40663-9)
I have to admit, that about 1/3 of the way through the article (about when the author started yammering about the computer not having any mass for non-processing parts, like that's gonna happen) I was wondering about how the computer's power supply starts the process of doing what it does. Then I got to thinking of what kind of power source could be used to provide the vast amount of disparate levels of power needed, And it struck me:
Use brownian motion from a hot cup of tea.
Douglas Adams had it all wrong when he was designing the Infinite Perspective Vortex, he was really designing the Infinate Calculation Device. (not to be confused with an improbibility generator)
Oh, never mind.
When I read the article, I came to think: To what use? What would you use such a computer for? And then: To simulate a universe, or merely, to be one. During the time of the existence of the micro-black-hole-computer, nothing is input, nothing is output. Everything is input at its creation, and output at its destruction. This would be a self-contined micro-universe, with one goal: To calculate something.
:)
At the time we create such a computer, we would be creating a universe. And our universe would then not matter any more.
Consider that our universe may be a black-hole. Maybe it is one created by someone, or someones.
Creating such a computer would be the goal of our existence, and the end of it (It would not matter anymore). Maybe history is just a long chain of such creations, inside each other?
The above text is definitely religion. But I couldn't stand writing it - the perspectives and thoughts from the article where so huge
--The knowledge that you are an idiot, is what distinguishes you from one.
Maybe, just maybe, God was really just trying to create a decent Quake Server and created the universe instead.
Techies hiring techies. Recruiting done right!
h / (4*E) in order to get units of seconds -- Planck's is in Joule.sec and E is in Joules.
This is in fact Heisenberg's uncertainty principle applied to time-energy :
delta(t) * delta(E) >= h/4
I have some doubts about h/4, because it could be hbar/4 (which is equal to h/(16*PI)). But this makes almost no difference. delta(t) can be interpreted as the lifetime of the quantum state and delta(E) would be the uncertainty in the energy, which for ground state is close to the total energy and that is where this approximation comes from.
There's a good chance we wouldn't be using laptops so far in the future. Just imagine someone in the previous century making predictions - "People will have telegraphy poles in their homes using advanced electrical technologies, and these poles will be so light, that anybody can lift them easiy, for they will be made of miraculous substances like plastics!"
Same thing - laptops may be the gee-whiz gadgets of today, just like room size computers were in the 50s. And they are as likely to be relevant in a future using quantum technology.
I don't see why the article focused on laptops, instead of just general quantum computing. No sense of perspective. Put this in the same category as those futuristic articles some decades ago about disposable paper clothes and waterproof furniture.
w/m
The moment we exhaust the physical limitations of these three dimensions, we'll find a way to use some others. People are more resourceful than you give them credit, especially when there's a buck to be made by it.
If this thing runs at a billion degrees, we'll need a very large heat sink. And I'll be damned if I'm putting a black hole on my lap. OTOH, there is something to be said about being able to simulate the neural net of a human being by simulating the location of every atom inside someone's head...
Imagine a Beowolf cluster of them
-- 73 de KG2V For the Children - RKBA! "You are what you do when it counts" - the Masso
Mysteriously though, blue light would still be able to escape from the Microsoft blackhole...
Need Free Juniper/NetScreen Support? JuniperForum
Watch out, you might get sucked in when you go to take your data to be processed by the black hole computer. That would really stink. I think I'll stick with my PC for now. Are there any predictions for how large the average black hole should be? This might not make a very practical computer...
thats nothing compared to a pentium 4's heat:)
Because a computer can't contain negative energies, the spread in energy of a bit cannot be greater than its total energy. In 1998, Norman Margolus and Lev Levitin of MIT calculated that the minimum time for a bit to flip is Planck's constant divided by four times the energy.
But according to Einstein's real equation, e^2=m^2c^4 + pc^2, from which we take the square root and arrive at the equation e=mc^2 (p=0). I believe Dirac was the first to toy with the notion of negative energy (or at least question it), since the square root of a number has two answers (positive and negative).
This is good news, since it will enable Microsoft to continue to build operating systems that ccasionally crash. Granted, they will have to reprogram the error routines to include Dark Matter Underflow and Not enough matter to complete operation, but this should be trivial.
In fact, it could be that the reason that earth occasionally swaps poles, is that the planets are really bits used in computing some cosmic calculation. Maybe the cosmos is already prototype of one of these devices.
Welcome to the desert of the real.
--
The computer would be interesting for super computers, but never for anything else. I don't see anyone walking around with a nuclear accident waiting to happen.
Why not?
The author calculated that, assuming Moore's law will continue to hold true, such computers would come into existence in about two hundred years. Now think back two hundred years. What was new technology then, comparable to our supercomputers? Steam engines: some advanced outlets had them, most manufacturers still used manual labor energy, water and animals. Even though the rate of technical progress has been rather slow during the past twohundred years compared to the past fifty years alone, those things have been obsolete for a long time now. You think your great^5 grandfather could imagine using *lightning* (the only form of electricity a peasant - most people were peasants back then - would have been familiar with) to light up his interior, to name but one example?
Your argument transplanted back to 1800 would run as follows:
Well, maybe they could somehow channel lightning to illuminate some big hall, such as a church or a palace, but my *house*? No way. That's just an accident waiting to happen.
We have no way of comprehending what will be possible in twohundred years time. It sucks, but face it, we'll just have to live without ever having known the good stuff.
News and bla for computer musicians: http://lomechanik.net/
Um, okay.. but personally I prefer today's 1kg laptop which doesn't nuke itself and everything in a mind boggling radius to total oblivion as part of the calculation process. It's more effective for getting useful results. :)
That's not quite the point of the article though, because it's really talking about having a 1kg power source and the rest of the article seems to go into more detail.
This thing makes me think of some old Isaac Asimov stories about a supercomputer called multivac. It did heaps of cool Orwellian stuff.. like calculate crimes people would commit each day so they could be arrested before they were committed.
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Where I work we had some Hitachi laptops that used to catch on fire because of some design flaw. No big deal really, nobody ever got hurt. So I can only imagine what might happen when something goes wrong inside one of these computers! I'd hate to be in the middle of typing a spreadsheet and suddenly my laptop dissappears out of existence, or worse yet, turns into a star!
...typing on a laptop that's become a singularity. The keys are *so* close together!
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Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Thus proving itself wrong.
And I thought I was special becuase no one else caught it. I just didn't read it close enough.
Bleh!