4 ms·
I was enjoying the ADHD hyper focus writing, kind of following along, then: > If we figure that the foil can meaningfully change direction every 20 μm, then
by vessenes 3mo ago
I was enjoying the ADHD hyper focus writing, kind of following along, then:
> If we figure that the foil can meaningfully change direction every 20 μm, then we might think of an aluminum-foil machine as being made of “moving parts” on the order of 1000 μm² (50 μm × 20 μm), 1000 “parts” per square millimeter of foil; a roll of kitchen aluminum foil is enough to fabricate some 4 billion “parts”. A bootstrapping compiler might require 100 000 parts and thus a square centimeter of aluminum foil, cut and folded around into a shape a couple of millimeters in diameter. If it were doing only one thing at a time, and needed 10 seconds to construct/assemble each moving part, it would take about 12 days to recompile itself. This is probably adequately fast, barely, but probably not adequately robust against errors. It would probably be better to design it to have more parts and do many things at once, enabling it to be faster and correct errors.
Um, what? I'd like to see a sketch of this 100,000 part compiler very much. I have no idea what he/she is talking about here, in the slightest. But I am intrigued!
- wgd 3mo agoI've read a lot of his other writings so that context might be informing my reading here but it sounds like he's pretty straightforwardly discussing the potential of aluminum foil as a uniform-feedstock-slash-construction-material for a hypothetical self-reproducing microfabricator.
- vessenes 3mo agoSure, sure. I feel as if there are a lot of steps between a roll of foil and that micro fabricator, though. Like, how are the aluminum fabricator pieces replicably specified to the fabricator? Or is it more like he could imagine silicon controlling stepper motors moving the aluminum fabricator pieces around? Perhaps I'm missing some commonly known self replicable micro fabricator design; if so, please <<--- send links.
- Perz1val 3mo agoIt reads like a rambling of a mad scientist, but I think simply adding pictures would make this feel absolutely normal (in the crowd of other blogs featured on hn)
- kragen 3mo agoAnd today... I shall TAKE OVER THE WORLD, Igor!
- kragen 3mo agoI do not currently have a sketch of a matter compiler, just a rough estimate that most of its parts count would probably be RAM, and that it probably needs several kilobytes of RAM.
- vessenes 3mo agoHi there! Thanks for the original post, and this sentence which exists in the same liminal space as the original post. Tell me more about the matter compiler as you imagine it?
- kragen 3mo agoYou're welcome! It's a pretty broad term, with a lot of possibilities, but generally I mean a machine which, given a design for a machine in the form of digital data, can build a working machine of that design without further human interaction. Some imperfect approximations of the idea already exist: - living things such as bacteria, humans, and plants: DNA is digital, true, but it's an unsolved problem to design the DNA to make a plant grow into the shape of even a chair, much less a bicycle, a lathe, or a computer. - 3-D printers such as RepRap: they generally can only produce very limited machines without further assembly, with only very limited palettes of materials, falling far short of being able to print a whole printer without human intervention. - ordinary compilers such as GCC: though they have already had a significant economic impact, they require a feedstock of magnetic disks or erased Flash from which to manufacture their output program, which still leaves their users vulnerable to TSMC and Western Digital. Worse, the output program depends on a CPU to run, leaving the users vulnerable to Intel and Qualcomm.