3 ms·

Ugh...same old shit, no new data to suggest that this might be possible within the time span mentioned. Moore's Law, Exponential Growth, blah blah blah.

by scotth 14y ago

habitmelon 14y ago
I am really tired of Moore's trend being referred to as a Law.
- jlgreco 14y ago
  It is a law though. The mistake is in thinking that means it will always hold true or is necessarily "correct". As wikipedia nicely puts it: Scientific laws: 1) summarize a large collection of facts determined by experiment into a single statement, 2) can usually be formulated mathematically as one or several statements or equation, or at least stated in a single sentence, so that it can be used to predict the outcome of an experiment, given the initial, boundary, and other physical conditions of the processes which take place, 3) are strongly supported by empirical evidence - they are scientific knowledge that experiments have repeatedly verified (and never falsified). Their accuracy does not change when new theories are worked out, but rather the scope of application, since the equation (if any) representing the law does not change. As with other scientific knowledge, they do not have absolute certainty like mathematical theorems or identities, and it is always possible for a law to be overturned by future observations. "Law" is not a stronger form of "theory", as is popularly believed. Now granted, it is not a particularly good law. Strictly speaking it is bad science, but a law it is nevertheless.
ChuckMcM 14y ago
Agreed, I read this: "If you make a simple calculation using Moore’s Law, you’ll find that these supercomputers, inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire human lifetime of 80 years—including every thought ever conceived during that lifetime—in the span of a month." And said to myself "Bzzzzzt! and thanks for playing." But I expect we'll see more before we see less, folks like my kids are graduating from college and they have had access to computers their "whole life" and they have always managed to get hugely faster and more powerful "their whole life" and so it becomes something of an assumption. When Intel drove the Pentium 4 off the process rails into the valley of heat death a lot of people said "Hmmm, that doesn't bode well." But the truth was even then memory speeds were flattening out, actual 'mean time to data' disk speeds have been slowing in lock step with the increase in density, and transactional state space that point in time where you know a transaction is well and truly complete, has gotten fuzzier and fuzzier. So while I enjoy the simulation hypothesis, and remember going to my friends with a short story based on it (the punch line was once you figured out you were in a simulation it crashed, which caused the people running that simulation to realize it and crash that one, all they way up to a programmer who sighs, and says "Ok, lets start again, first we need some light ..." I thought it was hugely clever and was quite proud of it, the editor at Analog (magazine I sent it to) just wrote "simulation hypothesis, no thanks." on the post card I got back. Well suffice it to say its not all that new a concept.

Ugh...same old shit, no new data to suggest that this might be possible within the time span mentioned. Moore's Law, Exponential Growth, blah blah blah.

by scotth 14y ago

Ugh...same old shit, no new data to suggest that this might be possible within the time span mentioned. Moore's Law, Exponential Growth, blah blah blah.

habitmelon 14y ago

I am really tired of Moore's trend being referred to as a Law.

jlgreco 14y ago
It is a law though. The mistake is in thinking that means it will always hold true or is necessarily "correct". As wikipedia nicely puts it: Scientific laws: 1) summarize a large collection of facts determined by experiment into a single statement, 2) can usually be formulated mathematically as one or several statements or equation, or at least stated in a single sentence, so that it can be used to predict the outcome of an experiment, given the initial, boundary, and other physical conditions of the processes which take place, 3) are strongly supported by empirical evidence - they are scientific knowledge that experiments have repeatedly verified (and never falsified). Their accuracy does not change when new theories are worked out, but rather the scope of application, since the equation (if any) representing the law does not change. As with other scientific knowledge, they do not have absolute certainty like mathematical theorems or identities, and it is always possible for a law to be overturned by future observations. "Law" is not a stronger form of "theory", as is popularly believed. Now granted, it is not a particularly good law. Strictly speaking it is bad science, but a law it is nevertheless.

ChuckMcM 14y ago

Agreed, I read this: "If you make a simple calculation using Moore’s Law, you’ll find that these supercomputers, inside of a decade, will have the ability to compute an entire human lifetime of 80 years—including every thought ever conceived during that lifetime—in the span of a month." And said to myself "Bzzzzzt! and thanks for playing." But I expect we'll see more before we see less, folks like my kids are graduating from college and they have had access to computers their "whole life" and they have always managed to get hugely faster and more powerful "their whole life" and so it becomes something of an assumption. When Intel drove the Pentium 4 off the process rails into the valley of heat death a lot of people said "Hmmm, that doesn't bode well." But the truth was even then memory speeds were flattening out, actual 'mean time to data' disk speeds have been slowing in lock step with the increase in density, and transactional state space that point in time where you know a transaction is well and truly complete, has gotten fuzzier and fuzzier. So while I enjoy the simulation hypothesis, and remember going to my friends with a short story based on it (the punch line was once you figured out you were in a simulation it crashed, which caused the people running that simulation to realize it and crash that one, all they way up to a programmer who sighs, and says "Ok, lets start again, first we need some light ..." I thought it was hugely clever and was quite proud of it, the editor at Analog (magazine I sent it to) just wrote "simulation hypothesis, no thanks." on the post card I got back. Well suffice it to say its not all that new a concept.