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Comment Threads

• gravelbelly22 commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
  "Solving specialised sums" ??? (Breathes deeply) Ah-hah! It's the flame war in a can, redux! You won't catch me that easily... (Flashback alert) Way back in the day, it wasn't Space Invaders, it was Microsoft Flight Simulator. And it wasn't a test of programming ability, it was a test of whether a particular PC clone was fully compatible... I'll just mention 640K once or twice now... Strangely, specialised sums (even in radar signal processors) are often the easy bit. Granted, it can be fun tracking truncation errors and avoiding overflows when doing fixed-point arithmetic without benefit of standard libraries (or...
• Charlie Stross commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
  I suspect you're missing a deeper layer in Hannu's writing (hint: his PhD is in string theory) but I think we need the third book in the trilogy to make it clear....
• dirk.bruere commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
  Various odd comments: In General relativity energy is not conserved globally, only locally. DWave make a specialist quantum computer using quantum annealing. So far up to 1024 qubits. Google have run a neural net simulation on it to identify features in pictures. While uploading may be fantasy Human level, and beyond, neural sims are probably less than a decade away. If it turns out that we don't need to model all the internal biochemistry of a neuron the singularity will be here before 2025...
• paws4thot commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
  Paras 3 on - [looks balefully across office (or would if he wasn't on holiday) at safety assessment real-time system] Enough said? Incidentally, I have one piece of software where a single sub-program contains 2_000 (two thousand) lines of Ada, which is clearly far too many, but most of them are already logic structure or sub-program calls. I have tried to simplify it, but reached the conclusion that I'd be creating sub-programs rather than removing multiple copies of the same lines of code....
• Greg. Tingey commented on Understanding Reader Reviews
  dirk @ 239 If it turns out that we don't need to model all the internal biochemistry of a neuron the singularity will be here before 2025 BIG assumption. Is it "good enough"? Be very, very careful what you wish for ..... Byt "the singularity", I assume you actually mean "the next singularity", & that it will involve at least one form of AI though whether you are talking "self-aware" is unclear. Let's just hope it's not a Fredric Brown Answer -type answer to your question, then? And, of course, it WILL be like powered flight or submarines - it'll...