Eugene Leitl wrote:
> Sir, you demonstrate an obvious misunderstanding of details of the
> uploading process. It is much less coding than a large-scale physical
> simulation -- requiring a very different set of metaphors than common
> to code monkeys. Very little code, a huge sea of data. And sheer physics
> will prevent you from running it on anything less than a 10^6..10^9
> processor machine.
You've obviously never actually written a large-scale simulation program. Even the simplest (from a programming perspective) approaches to uploading will require at least hundreds of millions of lines of extremely complex code. That would be for a brute force molecular simulator, which would need far more power than you estimate (~10^30 MIPS, if I remember right).
Higher-level simulations can greatly reduce the computer power needed (as well as the volume of data), but they do so at the price of increasing program complexity. At the opposite end of the spectrum you arrive at software that elegantly models the abstract processes of the mind, and would be so big that it could never be written by humans (maybe 10^13 LOC?).
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
ewbrownv@mindspring.com