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Matrioshka Brains: computing at the limits of physics
- cstross 17y agoI'd like to note that this is probably the biggest borderline-plausible hard SF idea not to have caught on (at least on a large scale) in genre fiction. And that I shamelessly strip-mined Mr Bradbury's mountain of ideas for props in "Accelerando". (In case you were wondering where SF writers get their ideas from ...)
- chromophore 17y agoOf course it has. Dyson Spheres are famous in SF. The Matrioshka Brains are just distant relatives of the same.
- lionheart 17y agoWow, Charles Stross, I didn't know you were on HN. I'm a big fan. I love the sheer intensity of your work. Props!
- swombat 17y agoHeh, I wanted to post a comment pointing out that anyone who likes this article should definitely read Accelerando... Great book, thanks for writing it! :-)
- electromagnetic 17y agoIt is a shame they haven't caught on, but I believe there's a positive-feedback mechanism in advertising these ideas. Once an ingenious idea is made, it is only disseminated to a smaller percentage of people. One of these people then has to be inspired enough by the idea to borrow from the original creator. If the idea is borrowed, it is likely to live on for longer. If it gets borrowed in a movie, the idea will go global due to the sheer amount of people who will receive the idea compared to reading a sci/fi book. Once the idea has been spread enough, it will get borrowed enough. Before Asimov, robots were basically a chromed Frankenstein. However, now it's rare and rather dated to see a Frankenbot. Now it's typically benevolent robot/AI hurts humanity to help it, which was a frequent element in Asimov's own work. Megastructures haven't really appeared in Hollywood movies before. There was the Deathstar and the planetary ring in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, aside from that I seriously can't think of another without seriously stretching it. So until we see an actual-factual ringworld or dyson spheres, which are far more recognised ideas, I doubt we'll see a matrioshka brain, even though it has the biggest uses.
- Alex3917 17y agoProbably because it's so improbable. It essentially assumes that we'll hit the limits of technological innovation without discovering that any of our current ideas about physics and the nature of the universe are completely wrong. Long before we could ever make such a device I suspect we'll discover something along the lines of zero-point energy being real harvestable, that the universe is not in fact material and local, etc. I'm sure there are thousands more possibilities. And any one of them being true would make this device completely obsolete way before our technology advances to a point where we can create it.
- eru 17y agoThe universe is in fact not 'material' in some senses of the word. We already know that information / entropy is as least as real as energy and matter. And there are some hints that they may be even more fundamental.
- apsurd 17y agohttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder-why-theres-no-tipjar.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder... Respect.
- elblanco 17y agoOne of the things I like about HN is all the neat people on here. On the things I love about HN is all the people I see here who I'd like to know!
- chromophore 17y agohttp://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_search.htm http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_s... The link above is to a fermi lab program to look for Dyson spheres. The Matrioshka brain is a subset of the Dyson sphere. Something made famous, unfortunately, by Trekkers.
- drunkpotato 17y agoWhy is that unfortunate?
- GHFigs 17y agoScience fiction fandom snobbery.
- albertcardona 17y agoPerhaps the association to science fiction removes perceived rigor from the idea.
- chromophore 17y agoUnfortunate because it has distorted the original idea beyond recognition. :) A lot of people know F. J. Dyson only for Dyson "spheres" (the original conception was that of a swarm, SF modified the idea to a sphere, then shell). Though it's obvious he did a lot of other work and that the Dyson sphere was nothing as compared to what he has done. It was just a thought experiment.
- varjag 17y agoOne would imagine that on a Dyson sphere sized computer, intercommunication (limited by speed of light) will become major bottleneck. At some point amassing components will stop winning you performance due to physical dimensions.
- dhume 17y agoIf you're pooling enough people's resources to make a machine that big, you're probably going to get enough independent tasks to make good use of it too.
- cstross 17y agoYes, lightspeed is a bottleneck. A particular problem is that the computing elements are presumably vulnerable to radiation damage, thus placing a lower limit on the internal radius of the MB's innermost shell. If MBs are migratory, that's a good reason for expecting them to be associated with cooler, dimmer red dwarf stars -- or to be concentrated some way away from their stellar energy source, leaving a classical Dyson sphere in place to harvest energy and beam it to them via laser or maser. (This stuff got chewed over a lot on the extropians list in the early 90s, when the subject of "Jupiter Brains" -- what you get if you dismantle Jupiter and turn it into computing material -- was first raised. Googling on "neuron star" might provide some transitory amusement ...)
- khafra 17y agoI found your exposition on the other limit--bandwidth outside the brain--even more interesting. Assuming life expands to fill the available resources, once you create a Matrioshka brain you're pretty irrevocably tied to your star, for good or for ill.
- eru 17y agoYou might still want to send out `seeds' to other stars. Even if you can't communicate with them fully.
- Confusion 17y ago
- jheriko 17y agoi hope no one is taking this seriously, becayse the logic/"science" presented here is well... science fiction i guess.
- akkartik 17y agoHey Zyvex, it's 2010. How's my diamondoid nanoassembly coming along?
- mnemonicsloth 17y agoDrexler Sayeth: Contrary to popular opinion, diamond synthesis seems almost irrelevant to progress toward advanced nanosystems. At the current stage or research, it is both difficult and unnecessary. The current view is that we're ready to start work on a first generation of nanoassembly tools using designed proteins for tooltips and DNA scaffolds for programmable, atomically precise structure. The trouble is that it doesn't look like a first generation of molecular manufacturing tools are just around the corner, so the research isn't getting done. http://metamodern.com/2008/12/27/toward-advanced-nanosystems-materials-1/ http://metamodern.com/2008/12/27/toward-advanced-nanosystems...
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- spot 17y ago"Jim Von Ehr, the president of Zyvex LLC, has publicly stated that he believes that Zyvex will be able to do diamondoid nanoassembly by 2010." oops guess they missed their deadline. i would like to see a graph of how these predicted dates keep receding as a counterpoint to all the exponential graphs of progress.
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- metamemetics 17y agohow much will it cost to buy a solar-scale matrioshka brain? will it improve one's sex life and\or social status?
- RK 17y agoHumans looking for extraterrestrial intelligence might be looking for intelligence "similar" to humans, but might not "mega-intelligences" also be looking for things similar to what spawned them (i.e. similar to human level intelligences)?