I'm not saying that digital computing systems don't have their advantages. Indeed, our computers have vastly improved many things in our lives. But these advantages have primarily to do with the possibility of exact replication and easy troubleshooting. We tend to (want to) design all chaos out.
So the digital systems can be very reliable; you can make a robot repeat the same action exactly in the same way every time. In contrast, the brain never repeats itself. But this (or rather, the reason for this: the evolutionary process in the brain) is exactly the brain's main advantage; this is what makes it a complex adaptive system capable of dealing in context with arbitrary situations.
We must develop a completely different computing architecture, one that incorporates deterministic chaos (and thus is capable of supporting complex adaptive systems) if we ever hope to achieve artificial (general) intelligence.
P.S. Only general intelligence is worth discussing. The rest ain't worth the name.
]]>Of course, this is predicated on the "open" magnetic field lines of the Sun reaching all the way to Alpha Centauri. Then, the jet (aka "flux ropes") can't help but follow; plasma behaves completely different from gas, which wouldn't have followed a great distance.
]]>I bet on B.
]]>As to the magnetic field to deflect charged particles, it doesn't have to particularly strong.
]]>You may have pictured the Sun's magnetic field as that of a simple N-S magnet. But this is not the case. The Sun's magnetic field is substantially more complex.
]]>Moreover, a magnetic sail is a coil, not a surface. It can shrink and expand automatically, depending on the flux. But if it catches a magnetic field-aligned filament, held in shape by the electromagnetic pinch, then the flux doesn't fall with the distance from the Sun.
]]>Are you channeling H. P. Lovecraft intentionally, or do you think AGI is intrinsically likely to make people start going "Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!" on sight?
SoV @189: you're misinterpreting me: given what we know about critical masses, and about availability of plutonium, we can guess reasonably accurately about how much Pu239 and HEU the US government produced with that $2Tn. And then at how much energy we could extract from it using available tech (e.g. MOX fuel for fission reactors).
(It turns out that burning Pu239 and U235 in reactors is rather inefficient compared to the lightly enriched uranium used in commercial PWRs, which is why that's what the commercial sector does. In fact, that whopping great 100Mt H-bomb with it's 10^17 joules gives us roughly the same energy output of a 1Gw PWR running for 30 years. Who knew?)
]]>Luckily it's a very cost-ineffective way to send spam ...
]]>Haven't read "Saturn's Children", have we?
]]>