From: Alejandro Dubrovsky (s328940@student.uq.edu.au)
Date: Tue Sep 03 2002 - 07:44:09 MDT
On Tue, 2002-09-03 at 22:05, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> gts wrote:
> > I have no problem with that. But given enough time the odds will
> > eventually catch up to us, meaning that our existence in time must
> > still be finite.
>
> No, gts. Say you start out with 16 repair systems and the odds of any
> given repair system failing, over say the course of one millennium, are
> 1/2. The total odds of all 16 repair systems failing in the same
> millennium, which we'll assume for the sake of argument is enough to kill
> the system, will be 1/65536. Then suppose that you add 1 repair system
> every millennium (linear growth rate). Your *total* risk of dying over
> your *entire* infinite lifespan is 1/32768. Not 1/32768 per millennium.
> 1/32768 *total*.
>
Only for independent systems. Lots of events (eg sun going nova) are
likely to break more than one repair system at a time.
alejandro
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