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> Maybe computers of the future will give new meaning to the term "hive mind," with swarms of highly specialized but extremely efficient minuscule processors, a

> Maybe computers of the future will give new meaning to the term "hive mind," with swarms of highly specialized but extremely efficient minuscule processors, able to be reconfigured and deployed depending on the task at hand. Reminds me of a plot point in Children of Time, where literal ant colonies were repurposed in just this way.

jon_richards 5y ago
I thought maybe that’s what Terry Pratchett’s Hex was poking fun at, but it looks like Children of Time is quite new (2015 vs 1994 for Hex’s first appearance). I wonder what the origin of that trope is.
- wolfram74 5y ago
  I haven't read Hex, but I just read Children of Time, and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) plays around with the loosely computational nature of an ant colony. Probably a few people thought about it before then, but it's getting closer to the dawn of general computation at that point
  - krige 5y ago
    Hex is not a book but rather a recurring device in the Discworld series, mostly in later books centered on wizards - basically a technomagical computer analogue that is powered apparently by ants rather than electrons. Not sure how much did the late Pterry have the hivemind=computer analogy in mind but as an added bonus on the surface it does open up at least a few jokes about computer "bugs".
chillingeffect 5y ago
not to be cynical, but that dream is already here. that imagery has been used to sell research projects since i was 7 years old in 1982 reading about Hans Moravec's robots in Enter magazine. PC's were the first swarm, then laptops, then AWS, and now cell phones. the reason this works as a daydream is it implies "highly" and "extremely" mean "more than you know now" without a specific metric. You could read articles about how the first PowerQUICC was highly efficient, then the Pentium, then the first GPU, and currently the M1. as for "able to be recondigured and deployed," PC and phone apps cover this preetty nicely, but if that's insufficient, AWS (and co) is the latest incarnation. as for "hive mind," this part if the daydream endures bc it polarizes the sifference between heter and honogeneous computation units. This is alluring bc of the dream of undifferentiated cells being cleverly arranged to form arbitrary functions. Yet it's quite unnecessary. Every computation is effectively formed by hierarchical structures built from NAND gates. The only trope missing here is: Simple Rules

jon_richards 5y ago

I thought maybe that’s what Terry Pratchett’s Hex was poking fun at, but it looks like Children of Time is quite new (2015 vs 1994 for Hex’s first appearance). I wonder what the origin of that trope is.

wolfram74 5y ago
I haven't read Hex, but I just read Children of Time, and Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter (1979) plays around with the loosely computational nature of an ant colony. Probably a few people thought about it before then, but it's getting closer to the dawn of general computation at that point
- krige 5y ago
  Hex is not a book but rather a recurring device in the Discworld series, mostly in later books centered on wizards - basically a technomagical computer analogue that is powered apparently by ants rather than electrons. Not sure how much did the late Pterry have the hivemind=computer analogy in mind but as an added bonus on the surface it does open up at least a few jokes about computer "bugs".

chillingeffect 5y ago

not to be cynical, but that dream is already here. that imagery has been used to sell research projects since i was 7 years old in 1982 reading about Hans Moravec's robots in Enter magazine. PC's were the first swarm, then laptops, then AWS, and now cell phones. the reason this works as a daydream is it implies "highly" and "extremely" mean "more than you know now" without a specific metric. You could read articles about how the first PowerQUICC was highly efficient, then the Pentium, then the first GPU, and currently the M1. as for "able to be recondigured and deployed," PC and phone apps cover this preetty nicely, but if that's insufficient, AWS (and co) is the latest incarnation. as for "hive mind," this part if the daydream endures bc it polarizes the sifference between heter and honogeneous computation units. This is alluring bc of the dream of undifferentiated cells being cleverly arranged to form arbitrary functions. Yet it's quite unnecessary. Every computation is effectively formed by hierarchical structures built from NAND gates. The only trope missing here is: Simple Rules