Author: Robert Hyatt
Date: 17:44:10 10/18/03
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On October 17, 2003 at 16:30:16, Dann Corbit wrote: >From: >http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1 > >"It's obvious what the sixth paradigm will be after Moore's Law runs out of >steam during the second decade of this century. Chips today are flat (although >it does require up to 20 layers of material to produce one layer of circuitry). >Our brain, in contrast, is organized in three dimensions. We live in a three >dimensional world, why not use the third dimension? The human brain actually >uses a very inefficient electrochemical digital controlled analog computational >process. The bulk of the calculations are done in the interneuronal connections >at a speed of only about 200 calculations per second (in each connection), which >is about ten million times slower than contemporary electronic circuits. But the >brain gains its prodigious powers from its extremely parallel organization in >three dimensions. There are many technologies in the wings that build circuitry >in three dimensions. Nanotubes, for example, which are already working in >laboratories, build circuits from pentagonal arrays of carbon atoms. One cubic >inch of nanotube circuitry would be a million times more powerful than the human >brain. There are more than enough new computing technologies now being >researched, including three-dimensional silicon chips, optical computing, >crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of >accelerating returns as applied to computation going for a long time. > >Thus the (double) exponential growth of computing is broader than Moore's Law, >which refers to only one of its paradigms. And this accelerating growth of >computing is, in turn, part of the yet broader phenomenon of the accelerating >pace of any evolutionary process. Observers are quick to criticize >extrapolations of an exponential trend on the basis that the trend is bound to >run out of "resources." The classical example is when a species happens upon a >new habitat (e.g., rabbits in Australia), the species' numbers will grow >exponentially for a time, but then hit a limit when resources such as food and >space run out. > >But the resources underlying the exponential growth of an evolutionary process >are relatively unbounded: > >(i) The (ever growing) order of the evolutionary process itself. Each stage of >evolution provides more powerful tools for the next. In biological evolution, >the advent of DNA allowed more powerful and faster evolutionary "experiments." >Later, setting the "designs" of animal body plans during the Cambrian explosion >allowed rapid evolutionary development of other body organs such as the brain. >Or to take a more recent example, the advent of computer assisted design tools >allows rapid development of the next generation of computers. >(ii) The "chaos" of the environment in which the evolutionary process takes >place and which provides the options for further diversity. In biological >evolution, diversity enters the process in the form of mutations and ever >changing environmental conditions. In technological evolution, human ingenuity >combined with ever changing market conditions keep the process of innovation >going." I understand all of that. But as I said, look at the Cray-3 in detail. Silicon wafers (no carriers) stacked on top of each other, with vertical connectors that pierce the wafers. The Cray-3 is 10 years old. This really doesn't offer anything new, other than the rather minor gain of shorter distances. The problem is the cube issue. To make all paths 2x shorter, the cube has to become 1/8th of its original size. The same limit applies...
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