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Comment Threads

• scentofviolets commented on Mediocrity
  @216: This was sufficiently troubling to me that I went back to the original claim: You are mistaken, simulations are compressible, both in speed & memory requirements, that's precisely what advanced "game of life" algorigthms do. The technique being used to speed up the computations definitely trades of memory for speed; you can't do both at once. So as I said, while there is an algorithm that can compute every other state of Life without precomputing the intervening state (it's actually just a different collection rules that follow the original three in spirit), there is no algorithm that both speeds...
• scentofviolets commented on Mediocrity
  @226: So why aren't we overrun with insect intelligence robots? Shouldn't the galaxy be filled with them by now? Aren't you presupposing some sort of self-replicating ability that's been specifically disallowed in this scenario? An interesting factoid: self-reproducing machines have been around for, oh, I don't know, around a half-century already? The implicit problem is actually not having machines reproduce; it's having them do so from a sufficiently simple base of starting components. So yeah, little robots that click together pre-assembled arms, power units, etc to make identical robot can in some sense said to have reproduced itself. But that's...
• scentofviolets commented on Mediocrity
  @225: There is absolutely no way you can tell if you are in an simulation from inside it, if the entity running the simulation does not want you to. (See for instance virtual machines for sandboxing windows-vira) I suppose you have to distinguish intentional simulations from accidental ones. True, when you think of simulations you think there has to be a Simulator. But I don't know if that's necessarily true; the very famous counterexample (which, admittedly, cheats) are Wang's Carpets which apparently arose through some blind evolutionary process. So it's not impossible to believe that it's not just an infinite...
• Charlie Stross commented on Mediocrity
  And in your scenario, even humans don't count as self-reproducers: they can't basic carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, etc, and assemble the complex organic molecules from which they are constructed. Human beings aren't autonomous. Individually we can't even digest our own food without the assistance of a multi-species bacterial colony massing on the order of a kilogram and containing roughly two orders of magnitude more cells than there are in our bodies. (There's one in your gut, and one in mine. Ever wondered why you get the shits after a course of antibiotics?) It takes a critical number of us to maintain...
• bellinghman commented on Mediocrity
  That's a very, very long garbage collection; I recommend a separate GC process Who cares - it's not as though it needs to be a real-time process....