::scr Seti@Home & Global Warming

[Simon Wistow]

On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 02:05:20PM +0100, David Cantrell said:
> Not true.  For *some* types of calculations, it is the most efficient way
> of doing them.

Ah, slip of the forked tongue (he says pausing briefly to revive the
horse using CPR before swiftly flogging it to death again) - I meant
it's not efficent energy wise since there's he extra power needed to
pump it over the wires, run the switches and routers and stuff etc etc.

I thought about this over the weekend, mostly when I was thinking about
computer games. Do you remember when you had to doll out power to
various systems - angle the shields forwards, reroute power from the
warp nascelles through the primary plasma conduits to the forward
sensort arrays etc etc? That was what I was thinking about - energy as a
commodity (that and the scene in the otherwise excerable "Apollo 13" [0]
where they're trying to do something but they've only got a limited
energy budget) and a scarce one at that. Dunno why I was thinking
about that but I was and doing calculations over a network is just
innefficent and not scalable.

Then I thought about this article ...

"Peace, Love and Flying Cars" 
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/5/4/165243/6682

which talks about how there are only 3 inventions that are needed to
turn the world into Utopia [tm] (of course what that would be is
entirely debatable) the first of which would be unlimited energy.

Then I was thinking about the energy required to do calculations - I
once had cryptography explained to me in which the person showed that
for a certain key length (not even that long IIRC) then if we built a
dyson sphere round a star (http://www.d.kth.se/~asa/dysonFAQ.html) and
lined the inside with switches then there wouldn't be enough power in
the star to flick the switches enough times to do every permutation of
binary bits in order to crack the key.

That impressed me. Obviously for an even bigger key length there's not
enough power in the entire universe to crack it. Which is even more
impressive.

Conversely, I think I'd be right in saying that the more energy that you
chuck at a problem, the faster you can solve it. So with infinite energy
we could solve all problems pretty much instantaneously and then sit
around drinking daquiries wondering why the computer spat out the answer
42.

Which would be pretty cool.

[0] 

Dennis Pennis on carpet outside premiere for said film :

Dennis    : "Hey Tom, can I ask you a quick question" 
Tom Hanks : "Sure" 
Dennis    : "How does it feel to have made the perfect film about 
            space?"
Tom       : "How so?"
Dennis    : "It's got no atmosphere"

This actually happened. Although I probably quoted it wrong.


-- 
: it's not the heat, it's the humanity