5 ms·

This is an extremely good analogy that I must remember (if case anyone quotes this myth to me again, which hasn't happened in a couple of decades... :)

• ramraj07 4y ago
  I don’t think anyone except Luc Besson still thinks this is true anymore tho..
  • carlmr 4y ago
    I know that reference. When I watched that movie I was just like ugh, and then I continued watching, and it just got worse.
    • eru 4y ago
      Inception also used that myth, I think, to justify why time runs at different speed in the dream. (Which makes no sense, when they go multiple layers..)
      • WorldMaker 4y ago
        Related to that, I find I often end up getting into arguments with people over the "computers run at such faster speeds than humans" myths/tropes. It's very common in the cyberpunk genre especially that time "runs faster" for people inside simulation spaces (metaverses/The Matrix/whatever). (Or sometimes the other direction where robots/cyborgs are significantly faster than humans at "thinking".) Computers are very fast at raw, boring mathematical calculations such addition, but that doesn't transfer to entire physics simulations or human scale activities. Think about how much time it takes a large file to download/transfer, for instance. A lot of videogame design through history and continuing through the modern day is fighting to keep the physics simulation close to real time and lot of classic videogame glitches and/or bugs are when it takes longer than real time to simulate. (With the fun that the Halting Problem tells us that we'll never be certain exactly how long it takes to run algorithms, in general.)
        • eru 4y ago
          Well, with sufficiently advanced computers, your simulations can run as fast or your cyborgs think as fast as the plot demands. Many video games are and always have been pushing limits. So you'd expect many them to barely run on their contemporary hardware. (A notable exception is Tetris. Thanks to being invented by people on obsolete Soviet computers, no western computer ever had any trouble running it.) > With the fun that the Halting Problem tells us that we'll never be certain exactly how long it takes to run algorithms, in general. The Halting Problem is barely relevant here: it only applies to arbitrary programs. It doesn't have any bearing on running one specific computation faster.
          • WorldMaker 4y ago
            > Well, with sufficiently advanced computers, your simulations can run as fast or your cyborgs think as fast as the plot demands. We've reached the edges of Moore's Law. We're starting to see the horizon where "sufficiently advanced computers" end. You might be fine with plots playing fast and loose with physics limitations and optimistically still believe tomorrow's computers will be "magic". I'm just saying that it is starting to bug me versus realism in the exact same sorts of fashion as "humans only use 10% of their brains" tropes. "Computers only use 10% of their transistors." Just like the bad human trope, it ignores that most transistors are highly specialized (an FPU is not a GPU is not a general purpose CPU). > The Halting Problem is barely relevant here: it only applies to arbitrary programs. It doesn't have any bearing on running one specific computation faster. We're talking about extremely arbitrary programs from stories that are being done for the first time ever. "Hacks" that no one has ever done before. "Holodeck simulations" built in magic amounts of time just on a couple of spoken sentences. Humans "diving into" computer dreamscapes and doing all sorts of human scale simulation things in some sort of "quick time" which seems to be directly in the intersection of both the "humans only use 10% of their brains" myths and the "computers run really fast" myths. Those aren't just well studied apps running standalone without human interaction and with just "one specific computation". Those are REPLs and other human input devices including speech to text to ML (?) and complicated physics calculus that isn't just add/subtract things real fast and all sorts of other things that take wall clock time and are being "programmed" for the first time, on the fly. Of course The Halting Problem applies to all of those types of scenarios. I certainly enjoy watching/reading such magic computer fantasies when I can muster a suspension of disbelief, but I've also started to feel like most of them are written by people that have never faced the contemporary realities of computer programming and believe in a myth of magically faster computers and human interface design that doesn't exist today and pessimistically may never exist.
    • KineticLensman 4y ago
      Somewhat coincidentally, I watched it - the film Lucy - yesterday and can confirm that it does indeed get worse. I would have liked it better if the story arc was more like 'Flowers for Algernon'.
• mistermann 4y ago
  It's a good analogy for the hardware (brain) aspect, but there's also the software (mind) aspect.