From: Anders Sandberg (nv91-asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Sun Feb 02 1997 - 12:46:35 MST
On Thu, 30 Jan 1997, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
> Well, I didn't mean it that way: I meant one KQb could be substantially
> beyond the Singularity threshold, after which all conscious entities
> might merge and "tools" no longer perceived as discrete objects, in
> which case "ubiquitous" might not make any sense.
Let's see, I am sure we will have a few KQb quite soon. I bet it will be
interesting, possibly useful but not lauch us into the singularity the
night after the laboratory prototype works. Just because you can design
proteins well doesn't mean nanotech and SI will appear next tuesday. Of
course, a KQb would still speed up things substantially, but to really get
into the singularity we need to reach the strongly intelligence augmenting
regime; a QAI might come in handy.
> Could be... even post-Singularity, the logic seems as strong as ever:
> Why waste the uncounted counterfactual branches of reality when they
> could be performing useful work? Assuming we can't (or don't want to)
> rewrite the laws of physics, continued QC does seem very probable.
Yes, it is both reversible and could possibly become very dense. The
question is how long the coherence times and lengths can be made; the
last results suggest several minutes at least.
> Finding messages in Pi? Why would QC help?
Just joking/trying to find an application.
> Last time I checked the
> most efficient way of finding pi was a continuing approximation; an
> equation which, each time you ran the current approximation through,
> added another 14 digits of precision. (It was revolutionary because
> previously, you needed to add up a lot of fractions and decide the
> precision in advance.) It seems like an entirely linear computation.
There exists another fun calculation that allows you to find the x:th
digit of pi in O(something small) without calculating the previous d-1
digits, this has been used to calculate the ten billionth digit of pi; see
http://www.mathsoft.com/asolve/plouffe/plouffe.html
I wonder if there is some way of calculating pi faster on a quantum
computer.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension!
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