Re: singularity and exi-GIMPS team

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Aug 12 1999 - 12:10:55 MDT


Brian Atkins wrote:
>
> I would be very interested in having access to "our own"
> distributed network. I could see using it for possibly
> rendering scenes from Extropian/>H art projects. Of course
> besides building the system itself (there have got to be some
> open source projects going on by now for this), we would
> need some way of determining what gets run on it (or pieces
> of it) at any given time if it is going to be multi-use.
> It would be appealing to me to have some kind of market-
> based pricing mechanism whereby someone who really needed
> it could pay to preempt whatever we all decide to normally run
> on it "for free". If it actually worked, it might lead eventually
> to the development of a large net-wide market for CPU time.

Careful about that market! If you don't make sure there's a tradition
of running charity projects on the seventh of each month, or something,
seed AIs will be too expensive to run. What we need is software that
can use heuristics, or something, anything, that can be improved by
genetic algorithms - then there's a motive for everyone on the planet to
get together and run a huge program once a month.

-- 
           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians   Heading for Singularity   There Is A Better Way


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