From: Hara Ra (harara@shamanics.com)
Date: Sun Jul 12 1998 - 03:23:44 MDT
Gene says:
>I am very heartened with the promise of evolvable hardware (EHW), GA
>acting upon (analog) FPGA. This
>
(list of desirable attributes)
>
>With some effort, today a more or less clever hacker could build a Wintelian
>(that will take care of 90% of everything) worm, packing constructive
>buffer overruns together with an IP scanner. As IP addresses of PPP
>dialup accounts are typically world-visible, you could participate in
>the fun. The worm will not be able to do anything very constructive,
>but only because current computer performance and networking
>bandwidth is so very pathetic and the state of the art in GP is
>in statu nascendi.
The bigger, faster, louder is better meme has been around for a long long
time.... If you take a dog, upload it and run it at 10^6 that of realtime,
you have a very fast dog, but it still is a dog. I think we have a lot to
learn before a SI becomes feasible.
I note these days with dour pleasure that the hardware has gotten so much
ahead of the software that most folks like 266 Mhz $1000 Wintel boxes so the
PC more (everything) to run (huger and huger) bloatware trend is less now.
Someone with better data that I have (John Clark?) might think about how many
machine cycles are equivalent to evolution of human beings from
archaeobacteria,
as this might provide a clue as to just how fast the hardware must be to
create
an SI from evolutionary principles. I sort of doubt it is less than say 10^50
operations....??
O--------------------------------O
| Hara Ra <harara@shamanics.com> |
| Box 8334 Santa Cruz, CA 95061 |
| |
| Death is for animals; |
| immortality for gods. |
| Technology is the means by |
| which we make the transition. |
O--------------------------------O
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