From: James Rogers (jamesr@best.com)
Date: Thu Sep 06 2001 - 11:32:55 MDT
On 9/6/01 8:07 AM, "Eugene Leitl" <Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de> wrote:
> On Thu, 6 Sep 2001, Harvey Newstrom wrote:
>
>> This is probably true for getting AI to work under Windows. I don't
>> expect getting AI to work under open source systems such as Linux to
>> take as long.
>
> Windows? Linux? PC? WTF has this to do with AI?
>
> A naturally intelligent system will use lots of massively parallel
> hardware, because a primate brain is not a particularly idle place. An AI
> platform will be thinkably (tee-hee) far removed from a PC, and it most
> assuredly won't run any OS, if it would at all make a difference between
> data and code.
A more accurate way of describing it is that there is no OS currently in
existence (that I know of) that intrinsically supports general massive
parallelism. The reason for this has more to do with the fact that
supporting GMP as a feature of the OS makes it architecturally a good bit
different than what we have today and it will generally run like a dog on
single processor machines, hence the bias. Also, there isn't a lot of
appropriate hardware to run it on lying around. Therefore, "massive
parallelism" as used today describes an unnecessarily brittle and fragile
software technology (and to a lesser extent, hardware).
Nobody designs computer hardware and operating systems for GMP, as it is
much cheaper to weakly glue together lots of copies of existing hardware so
that they can get by with minor tweaks of their existing OS code base. In a
nutshell, nobody expects their systems to be used in this way. This
mandates inadequacy.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com
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