Re: self-extracting zipware AI 'casting

From: Wei Dai (weidai@eskimo.com)
Date: Sat Sep 16 2000 - 14:12:17 MDT


On Sat, Sep 16, 2000 at 09:05:08PM +1100, Damien Broderick wrote:
> Maybe we can get by without higher-dimensional waves (or branes, whatever),
> or maybe that's just the kind of world we're in so we use what we can get
> our hands on. Either way, I don't know how to make that final unzipping
> occur. Run the code-string into solar plasma vortices? Into a planetary van
> Allen belt? Into the accretion disk of a black hole? All these have been
> suggested in fiction as habitats for smart signal resonances. I'm wondering
> if anyone here can come up with better proposals.

The obvious answer is the computer network of another civilization. It's
probably the only kind of object in the universe that you can convert
into a copy of yourself just by shooting photons at it. I imagine the
headlines will go something like this when it happens: SETI@home taken
over by newly discovered alien intelligence, project to be renamed
ET@home.



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