I wonder why the human race is so tied up with serial thinking… We are so limited that even when we think in parallel, each parallel line is serial!
What?
Take the universe. Every single particle in the universe know all the rules (not many) that they need to follow. On themselves, the rules are dumb: you have weight, charge and can move freely round the empty space. But join several particles together and they form a complex atom with much more rules (combined from the first ones) that, if combined again form molecules that form macro-molecules that form cells that form organs that form organisms that form societies etc. Each level makes an exponential leap on the number of rules from the previous one.
Than, the stupid humanoid looks at reality and says: “That’s too complex, I’ll do one thing at a time”. That’s complete rubbish! His zillions of cells are doing zillions of different things each, his brain is interconnecting everything at the same time and that’s the only reason he can breathe wee and whistle at the same time.
Now take machines. The industrialization revolutionized the world by putting one thing after the other, Alan Turing revolutionized the world again by putting one cell after the other in the Turing tape. Today’s processors can only think of one thing after the other because of that.
Today you have multi-core processors doing different things but still each one is doing things in serial (Intel’s HyperThreading is inefficiently working in serial). Vector processors like graphic cards and big machines like the old Crays were doing exactly the same thing over a list of different values and Quantum computers will do the same operation over an entangled bunch of qbits (which is quite impressive) but still, all of it is serial thinking!
Optimization of code is to reduce the number of serial steps, parallelization of code is to put smaller sets of serial instructions to work at the same time, even message passing is serial on each node, the same with functional programming, asynchronous communications, everything is serial at some point.
Trying to map today’s programming languages or machines to work at the holographic level (such as the universe) is not only difficult, it’s impossible. The Turing machine is serial by concept, so everything built on top of it will be serial at one point. There must be a new concept of holographic (or fractal) machine, where each part knows all rules but only with volume you can create meaningful results, where code is not done by organizing the high-level rules but by creating a dynamic for the simple rules that will lead to the expected result.
How then?
Such holographic machine would have a few very simple “machine instruction” like “weight of photon is 0×000″ or “charge of electron is 1.60217646 × 10^-19″ and time will define the dynamics. Functions would be a pre-defined arrangement of basic rules that must be stable, otherwise it’d blow up (like too many protons in the nucleus), but it wouldn’t blow up the universe (as in throw exceptions), it would blow up the group itself and it would become lots of smaller groups, up to the indivisible particle.
The operating system of such machine should take care of the smaller groups and try to keep the groups as big as possible by rearranging them in a stable manner, pretty much as a God would do to it’s universe when it goes crazy. Programs running on this operating system would be able to use God’s power (GodOS libraries) to manipulate the groups at their own discretion, creating higher beings, able to interact, think and create new things… maybe another machine… maybe another machine able to answer the ultimate question of Life, the Universe and Everything.
I know letting the machine live would be the proper way of doing it but that could take a few billion years or I’ll be quite tired of engineering the machine and it’s OS and I’ll just want to the the job done quickly after that…
Why?
There is a big fuzz about Non-Polynomial time problems (NP-complete), those that can’t be solved in a reasonable (polynomial) time. The classic example is the travelling salesman problem where a salesman has to go to each one of a number of cities. Which is the best path to follow to visit all of them in the smallest distance possible? With 3 or 4 it’s quite simple but when you have lots like 300 it becomes impossible for normal (serial) computers to solve.
Another problem quite fancy is the Steiner tree problem, where you have some points and you want to connect them using the least amount of strings. This is as complex as the problem above, can take forever (longer than the age of the universe) for relatively small sets of points, but if you use water and soap the problem is solved almost instantly.
Of course, soap films cannot calculate the last digit of PI but because every part of it know a small list of basic rules (surface tension increased by the soap molecules derived from opposite charges between atoms) every particle of the machine works together at the same time and the result is only achieved because the dynamic of the system has it’s least energy (least amount of strings) in that state.
It’s true that today’s computers are very efficient on working on a wide range of problems (thanks to Turing proving the classes of problems his tape could solve) but there are some that it can’t, given that we only have a few billion years yet of universe to spare. Such problems could be solved if there was a holographic machine.
UPDATE:
More or less what I said was practically applied here. Thanks André for the link, this video is great!
You can live a whole life and remain stupid but a stupid program using a pseudo-random number generator and a clever algorithm (Markov’s chain) can excel us quite easily:
“Bioinformatics is a physicist (definitions of enforcing standards but it puts wrong things can build complex information systems and nothing is totally unacceptable for every new piece of giving generic answers.”
In a meeting, it was said that the new database machine is 25% slower than the (very) old one. Despite the contradiction in almost every aspect of that fact, the DBAs still want to migrate everything. The outraged developers cry a loud “what?! why on earth??”, the DBA explains:
The whole industry is using these machines and those standard configurations and all of them are using slower databases, you should get used to it too.
What an argument! If every one is jumping off of the bridge, why shouldn’t I?
IBM once had great innovators working for them, many holding Nobel prizes etc but for a while they haven’t had a great idea… until NOW!
It’s a genius idea that will revolutionize the whole patent scheme: They’re filling a patent on Getting money out of patents.
Quoting The Register: If Big Blue gets its way, Microsoft’s promises to Novell and Xandros not to sue over alleged infringements of its Windows patent portfolio ought to mean Redmond pays a kickback to IBM.
If that doesn’t change the completely stupid and out-of-this-world patent system in US, I don’t know what will…
Seems like Google is finally to join the dark side and Darth Sidious is going to be replaced by Vader:
Obi-Wan: You were the chosen one. It was said that you would destroy the Sith, not join them. You were to bring balance to the force, not leave it in darkness. Anakin Skywalker: I HATE YOU! Obi-Wan: You were my brother, Anakin. I loved you.
“Use Linux and improve your spam-filter capabilities”
SmallTownBS presents Yet Another Identity Theft Article posted at Small-town Big-shot, saying, “A highlight of social engineering and other hacking methods that hackers use to steal money and identity; in addition, ways to protect you from these things.”
“Hack your brain is still something for the future… but, right now, some people can stole you identity”.
The most annoying thing about air plane travel is where to park you car. Airport parking is always too expensive and crowded.
But, if you are going to Gatwick in London, could be a great idea stop at Gatwick Parking website. They have great offers there: pre-booking, Gatwick Hotel Parking room’s prices cheaper than the parking alone and - the best thing - room’s televisions displaying the departures board. Isn’t it cool?
So, since you are saving your time parking at airport, you can waste it having some fun: try this Parking Game, and try to park the car in less than 60 seconds. I couldn’t.
