From: Samantha Atkins (samantha@objectent.com)
Date: Mon Jan 28 2002 - 04:20:18 MST
Eugene Leitl wrote:
> On Sun, 27 Jan 2002, animated silicon love doll wrote:
>
>
>>some things here go over my head, but until now i don't think i've
>>seen anything that i just completely don't get. so. what's a GOP?
>>unless you're talking about 2 republicans full of braindead sequential
>>operations...
>>
>
> oh, a GOPS is a Giga Operation Per Second. 1e9, 1000000000, one billion
> shiny funky CPU operations of second. Modern CPUs are capable of several
> GOPS.
>
>
>>slightly less important, but on a similar note, could anyone give me a
>>precise definition of computronium?
>>
>
> computronium is a molecular crystal, its elementary cells being little
> primitive computers (each just capable of communicating with it's
> neighbours, and only keeping track of a few bits). it is a hardware
> implementation of a particular cellular automaton, and it is provably the
> most efficient computer which can be built from matter. basically, it's a
> chemical substance (not an element, as the name would seem to imply, that
> would have been *too* easy) that forms a very powerful computer, if
> crystallized.
>
> now, you're probably going to ask what a cellular automaton is....
Nope. But has there been much work on doing general-purpose
computation on CA? What kind of languages, methodologies,
algorithms and so on most take advantage of such ultimate
computer hardware? Shouldn't some small-scale virtual models be
build and various software tools designed and evaluated on them
today?
Please point me to any relevant literature on the software side
you may have handy.
- samantha
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