The significance of Apu Punchau

David Stockhoff · 01 Jan 2009, 02:39 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 21:39:04 -0500
Subject: (urth) The significance of Apu Punchau
In-Reply-To: <mailman.1.1230761283.28422.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
References: <mailman.1.1230761283.28422.urth-urth.net at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID: <495C2CC8.7080605 at verizon.net>

Sure, the but the issue is not running Briah, as is clearly in some sense the case. The issue is controlling each iteration to be nearly identical to, and presumably always slightly better than, the "last." Sorry, no.

------------------------------

Message: 3
Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 10:06:45 -0500
From: "Gwern Branwen" <gwern0 at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: (urth) The significance of Apu Punchau
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Message-ID:
	<cbf55b100812310706x17a799b5q9aada27924a0732a at mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512

On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 9:45 AM, David Stockhoff  wrote:

> > Jeff Obviously, this is not a matter that can be truly resolved. You're
> > right that the destiny-control machinery must be used for something, and we
> > are told in general terms what that is. But again I'd have to assert that,
> > if common-sense analysis means anything here, one archipelago per galaxy is
> > simply not enough computing power, however you measure it, to micromanage
> > each world in a galaxy---but also that it would surely require such energy
> > to run (and there has to be implementation as well) that it would take an
> > entire universe to feed it.
>   

This would be incorrect; you drastically underestimate the limits of
computing. An area the size of a laptop could simulate entire worlds
many many times over.

Good reading in this are includes Seth Lloyd's paper "Ultimate
physical limits to computation". See
http://www.ar-tiste.com/qcomp_onion/jan2002/UltimateLaptop.htm and
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043

The limits are intimidatingly vast, and certainly many times (if not
orders) greater than what they need to run Briah.

- --
gwern

---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 081231-0, 12/31/2008
Tested on: 12/31/2008 9:39:05 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2009 ALWIL Software.
http://www.avast.com

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net