6 ms·
Sounds like it's possible to run any algorithm in the world in 1 clock cycle.
by WithinReason 3y ago
Sounds like it's possible to run any algorithm in the world in 1 clock cycle.
- robinduckett 3y agoI like the Quantum BogoSort as a proof of this /s
- ajb 3y agoIt isn't, because eventually the size of your logic or table becomes larger than the distance a signal can propagate in one clock tick. Before that, it likely presents practical issues (eg, is it worth dedicating that much silicon)
- willcipriano 3y agoHave slower ticks. A planet size CPU that runs at .5 hz but can work on impossibly large numbers.
- gameshot911 3y agoThat's actually a really fascinating science fiction idea!
- willcipriano 3y agoIt's sort of the plot of the Douglas Adam's books. https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Earth https://hitchhikers.fandom.com/wiki/Earth
- com2kid 3y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matrioshka_brain :-D It's a topic that has been explored quite a bit in science fiction literature.
- karmakaze 3y agoRelated to the fallacy of comparing what's slow in our world with what's computable in a simulation of it--there's no requirement for time to tick similarly.
- volemo 3y agoAnd 27.7% [1] of the planet's crust is silicon already! [1] Britannica: Silicon
- Dylan16807 3y ago> Have slower ticks. Yes, this solves the stated issue about huge lookup tables. > A planet size CPU that runs at .5 hz but can work on impossibly large numbers. This doesn't make much sense to me, though. If your goal is "any algorithm", you'll often have to go a lot slower than .5Hz. A hash-calculating circuit that's built out of a single mountain of silicon could have a critical path that's light-years long. But if your goal is just "work on impossibly large numbers", but it's okay to take multiple ticks, then there's no reason to drag the frequency down that low. You can run a planet-scale CPU at 1GHz. CPUs have no need for signals to go all the way across inside a single tick.
- Vecr 3y agoYou'd need way better clocks and synchronization circuits than exist now though, but I don't see any pure physical barriers.
- Dylan16807 3y agoThe whole thing doesn't need to be on the same clock domain. You can put clock crossings every inch.
- brudgers 3y agoimpossibly large numbers Forty-two for example?
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- rcxdude 3y agoWith a sufficiently large chip and a sufficiently slow clock, sure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- retrac 3y agoYes. In theory, any pure function can be turned into a lookup table. And any lookup table that isn't just random numbers can be turned into a more compact algorithm that spends compute to save space. Such tables may be infeasible, though. While a int8 -> int8 table only needs 256 bytes, an int32 -> int32 needs 16 gigabytes.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoFractal functions are pure, but don’t lend themselves well to memoization nor lookup tables.
- meindnoch 3y agoWhat does this statement even mean? Every function from a finite domain is just a lookup table, period.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoWho said anything about finite-domains?
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- meindnoch 3y agoEvery function has finite domain on a computer.
- DaiPlusPlus 3y agoArbitrary-precision real-number libraries would disagree with you there.
- meindnoch 3y agoFalse. A computer always has a finite amount of memory.