"Fisher has been on Intel's payroll for quite some time: he worked on the 486 cpu, the definition of mmx and sse instructions, and also on the Pentium III. The previous product that Fisher worked on was codenamed 'Tejas'. It was to be a 65nm version of the Pentium 4 with an extremely long pipeline of 40 to 50 steps, in order to achieve clock speeds of 7GHz or even higher."
Wow, up to 50 stages in the pipeline, and they were close to tapeout! Sheesh, someone needs to secretly tape it out and put that thing on ebay with a tank of liquid helium.
Re:I agree... no time soon..
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
Another problem is that the game ends only by consent. It's possible for two players to pass after 5 moves but no competent human players would do since territories are not clearly defined. Contrast this with chess where the game ends by the clearly defined checkmate of the king.
If the milky way were to collide with another galaxy and we were very lucky, perhaps many alien star systems would be brought into closer proximity to our own, and we would be given a once in a solar life time chance at space colonization. Perhaps we might discover some way of manipulating very large portions of the universe to create such a collision within a million years should other methods take too long or fail us completely. I know this seems rather unlikely since the last I heard, the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate, creating a far larger average distance between galaxies over time. I have seen photos of galaxies colliding though. There may very well be sentient inhabitants in each galaxy that were brought within close proximity of each other (and hopefully survived the adverse effects to make contact...)
Morality is only partially defined at this point, there may still very well be a scientific discovery that brings the concept into sharper focus akin to what the discovery of the structure of DNA did for the classification of life. There is ofcourse also the issue of what an individual moral agent "ought" to do. This line of questioning will always end when we cite some ineffable feeling in us that in itself has nothing to do with what science can tell us. Still, I think the point of research like this is to make nebulous and magical words like "ought" and "should" more precise so we can examine our own motivations before making a decision.
For other subjects like mathematics or physics, we can ask whether there would be some sensible notion of it if no humans ever existed; ethics however, is essentially tied to humanity. Consider for instance if we were a sentient race that had evolved from black widow spiders instead of great apes. The males would gladly volunteer their bodies for the females snack on after mating. Hatching a large clutch of young would likely mean that a single infant life in this society isn't nearly as valuable as it would be for a mammal. It's clear our morality would be wildly different in many aspects from what it is today, on the issues of erotic cannibalism and abortion. There is little more to ethics than the circumstances of the species which partake in it which we can hope to discern from scientific inquiry.
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"Fisher has been on Intel's payroll for quite some time: he worked on the 486 cpu, the definition of mmx and sse instructions, and also on the Pentium III. The previous product that Fisher worked on was codenamed 'Tejas'. It was to be a 65nm version of the Pentium 4 with an extremely long pipeline of 40 to 50 steps, in order to achieve clock speeds of 7GHz or even higher." Wow, up to 50 stages in the pipeline, and they were close to tapeout! Sheesh, someone needs to secretly tape it out and put that thing on ebay with a tank of liquid helium.
Another problem is that the game ends only by consent. It's possible for two players to pass after 5 moves but no competent human players would do since territories are not clearly defined. Contrast this with chess where the game ends by the clearly defined checkmate of the king.
If the milky way were to collide with another galaxy and we were very lucky, perhaps many alien star systems would be brought into closer proximity to our own, and we would be given a once in a solar life time chance at space colonization. Perhaps we might discover some way of manipulating very large portions of the universe to create such a collision within a million years should other methods take too long or fail us completely. I know this seems rather unlikely since the last I heard, the universe was expanding at an accelerating rate, creating a far larger average distance between galaxies over time. I have seen photos of galaxies colliding though. There may very well be sentient inhabitants in each galaxy that were brought within close proximity of each other (and hopefully survived the adverse effects to make contact...)
Morality is only partially defined at this point, there may still very well be a scientific discovery that brings the concept into sharper focus akin to what the discovery of the structure of DNA did for the classification of life. There is ofcourse also the issue of what an individual moral agent "ought" to do. This line of questioning will always end when we cite some ineffable feeling in us that in itself has nothing to do with what science can tell us. Still, I think the point of research like this is to make nebulous and magical words like "ought" and "should" more precise so we can examine our own motivations before making a decision.
For other subjects like mathematics or physics, we can ask whether there would be some sensible notion of it if no humans ever existed; ethics however, is essentially tied to humanity. Consider for instance if we were a sentient race that had evolved from black widow spiders instead of great apes. The males would gladly volunteer their bodies for the females snack on after mating. Hatching a large clutch of young would likely mean that a single infant life in this society isn't nearly as valuable as it would be for a mammal. It's clear our morality would be wildly different in many aspects from what it is today, on the issues of erotic cannibalism and abortion. There is little more to ethics than the circumstances of the species which partake in it which we can hope to discern from scientific inquiry.