From: Mike Lorrey (mlorrey@yahoo.com)
Date: Tue Dec 03 2002 - 18:33:48 MST
--- Ramez Naam <mez@apexnano.com> wrote:
>
>
> From: Anders Sandberg [mailto:asa@nada.kth.se]
> > I think there is a difference. To make a car-making swarm you
> > don't try to design 10^20 assemblers of a few billion atoms
> > each and then simulate the whole system at atomic precision.
> > It would be as ridiculous as putting together the car atom by
> > atom by STM. Instead you design one assembler "by hand",
> > first by making the important core functions and simulating
> > them carefully, then by adding the extras like coating,
> > running the entire assembler on first simplified code and
> > then more and more exact code and tricky environments.
>
> Ahh, here again I've done what Robert Bradbury pointed out and
> combined too many design issues into one, losing clarity along the
> way.
>
> You're absolutely right: at the point at which you have the
> assemblers
> designed, you don't use atomic precision to model the whole swarm.
>
> That having been said, modeling the behavior of the swarm to build
> the
> car is in and of itself a /second/ daunting design problem, one that
> is also far beyond our current understanding. And again, I feel that
> no one has provided a plausible mathematical analysis of just how
> complex this problem is.
I don't think it is really that difficult a problem, multicell
organisms do it all the time. It's called cellular differentiation, and
it is genetically coded. The human genome fits into 4 CD-ROMs, and an
automobile is a far more simple device than the human body. I'll bet
that you could evolve the code for the genome for a 007 Aston-Martin in
less than 100 megabytes.
>
> > (although I have no doubt that there will be plenty of hacks
> > and crufy code in nanotech too - which is seriously worrying).
> > Creating strict interfaces and abstraction barriers is a way of
> > managing complexity, be it code or atoms.
>
> Indeed. I spent the last several years of my life managing the
> development of software projects with millions of lines of code -
> projects that consumed thousands of man-years of development and
> testing time. My experience in that field is that humans are
> extremely bad at producing software that behaves reliably and
> predictably. No software engineering methodology that I have ever
> encountered has made more than a small dent in that belief. And the
> command and control problems of nanotech dwarf any software
> development problem mankind has ever undertaken.
The problem with conventional software development is that all current
applications are built by intention according to design rules, not by
evolutionary processes. A nanoswarm design process will give the design
for an auto to a neural network computer and allow it to evolve the
most effective cellular differentiation process to achieve the desired
design within the virtual environment. The most successful evolved
process becomes the code for the nano-swarm.
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