4 ms·

Are you disregarding the hypothetical assumptions of the question? Particularly that the people would not tire, age, or die, and already have all required knowl

by gnode 8y ago

Are you disregarding the hypothetical assumptions of the question? Particularly that the people would not tire, age, or die, and already have all required knowledge. Or, is your argument that the tasks involved in building an 8086-level computer and prerequisites are not serializable?

CommieBobDole 8y ago
Fair enough, I didn't properly read the conditions. Assuming (as the question does) that they're immortal and all-knowing, have access to all needed resources in raw form, and can entirely devote their lives to the project, I would change my answer to "an extremely large but non-infinite amount of time". I think the top answer radically understates the difficulty of the problem; not only would they need to build all of those things, they would need to build the tooling to build the components needed to build all of those things. And for those components, they would need to build the tooling to build the components used to build the components, and so on. Honestly, I think that even semi-accurately estimating the complexity of the work to be done would be months of work. To actually do it with 20 people, hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of years?
- CommieBobDole 8y ago
  And to answer your other question, there might still be a barrier that we're not considering. Something along the lines of "one of the manufacturing steps requires a perishable chemical, and because of other dependencies there's no way that 20 people can coordinate the steps to produce the minimum required quantity of the chemical and do the other steps so that all of the needed components are available at the right time before they go bad." So there's a unknown-likelihood chance that it's still impossible.
- derefr 8y ago
  There are interesting places that technological development could have “skipped ahead” that we can only see in retrospect. For example: it was possible to invent photolithography as soon as we had lenses, which means—provided we had the knowledge—we could have started with integrated circuits, skipping the relay, vacuum-tube, and discrete-transistor phases of computer development. Similar things are likely true in other steps given that we would have access to a huge breadth of “recipes” for rather-more-optimal chemicals (e.g. doping agents, etchants, electrolytes, etc.) than we started off trying. The reagents of these chemicals frequently don’t take any more effort to dig out of the ground than the ones for the less-efficient products; and they don’t take more sensitive or well-sealed equipment to react together, either. They just took sensitive, well-sealed equipment to discover, or were only accidentally discovered as byproducts or other processes we ended up only starting later on (like petroleum distillation.)
  - philipkglass 8y ago
    Could perhaps have jumped to integrated circuits as soon as transistors could be built, but vacuum tubes were buildable well before transistors. I think that with the existing industrial base as one resource, and knowledge of future technology as the other, semiconductor grade silicon could have been produced as early as the mid 1930s. Not much sooner. Germanium is rarer and less optimal in many ways (small band gap) but it is easier to purify. Could you make simple ICs based on germanium instead of silicon earlier than the mid 1930s? I don’t know what additional complications the germanium path might have. Maybe it’s impractical for reasons other than material purity.

by gnode 8y ago

CommieBobDole 8y ago

Fair enough, I didn't properly read the conditions. Assuming (as the question does) that they're immortal and all-knowing, have access to all needed resources in raw form, and can entirely devote their lives to the project, I would change my answer to "an extremely large but non-infinite amount of time". I think the top answer radically understates the difficulty of the problem; not only would they need to build all of those things, they would need to build the tooling to build the components needed to build all of those things. And for those components, they would need to build the tooling to build the components used to build the components, and so on. Honestly, I think that even semi-accurately estimating the complexity of the work to be done would be months of work. To actually do it with 20 people, hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of years?

CommieBobDole 8y ago
And to answer your other question, there might still be a barrier that we're not considering. Something along the lines of "one of the manufacturing steps requires a perishable chemical, and because of other dependencies there's no way that 20 people can coordinate the steps to produce the minimum required quantity of the chemical and do the other steps so that all of the needed components are available at the right time before they go bad." So there's a unknown-likelihood chance that it's still impossible.
derefr 8y ago
There are interesting places that technological development could have “skipped ahead” that we can only see in retrospect. For example: it was possible to invent photolithography as soon as we had lenses, which means—provided we had the knowledge—we could have started with integrated circuits, skipping the relay, vacuum-tube, and discrete-transistor phases of computer development. Similar things are likely true in other steps given that we would have access to a huge breadth of “recipes” for rather-more-optimal chemicals (e.g. doping agents, etchants, electrolytes, etc.) than we started off trying. The reagents of these chemicals frequently don’t take any more effort to dig out of the ground than the ones for the less-efficient products; and they don’t take more sensitive or well-sealed equipment to react together, either. They just took sensitive, well-sealed equipment to discover, or were only accidentally discovered as byproducts or other processes we ended up only starting later on (like petroleum distillation.)
- philipkglass 8y ago
  Could perhaps have jumped to integrated circuits as soon as transistors could be built, but vacuum tubes were buildable well before transistors. I think that with the existing industrial base as one resource, and knowledge of future technology as the other, semiconductor grade silicon could have been produced as early as the mid 1930s. Not much sooner. Germanium is rarer and less optimal in many ways (small band gap) but it is easier to purify. Could you make simple ICs based on germanium instead of silicon earlier than the mid 1930s? I don’t know what additional complications the germanium path might have. Maybe it’s impractical for reasons other than material purity.