Alt-BEAM Archive
Message #10841
To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: Daniel Grace lifebytes_98@yahoo.com
Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2000 04:19:18 -0800 (PST)
Subject: [alt-beam] Re: shack caps
Do electronics have a shelf life, without being in a
circuit?? I've never heard of this . . . . then again,
I've never delt with electronics from the 80's.
Wouldn't the components still be good as long as they
weren't in a circuit?
~Daniel
> One
> thing I know you have to watch out for is the age of
> the components,
> seriously, at some radio shacks I see some
> electronics products from the
> 80's. An original packet of stuff that just hadn't
> sold yet. Anyway, overall
> I'm still generally pleased.
>
> dennison
>
>
>
=====
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10842 Fri, 25 Feb 2000 07:46:57 -0600 [alt-beam] Re: BEAM: Tendency toward miniaturization beam@sgiblab.sgi.com Terry Newton At 08:10 PM 2/24/00 -0700, Robert Morris wrote:
>Creating billions of artificial neurons may not be as far off as you think,
>you might want to check out the work of Hugo de Garis at :
>http://foobar.starlab.net/~degaris
or http://www.genobyte.com
>He is a self proclaimed Brain Builder who is using FPGA's to
>evolve large scale neural nets in real time. Currently he has a neural
>network containing 75 million neurons and is hoping for a billion by 2001.
I've heard of that... even studied it and came to the conclusion that
FPGA's draw too much power :) But a neural net does not make a brain,
it's just a net - processes inputs into outputs. No matter how many
millions you pack together it is what it is and no more. Just bigger.
And the bigger they are, the longer it takes them to learn.
>As far as the quantum microtubules being the seat of the soul, this may or
>may not be true, but I don't believe that the possibility for robots to
>make use
>of this is a far-fetched idea.
It isn't really that far fetched - provided one doesn't get carried
away with possibilities of consciousness... it is actually a very
simple thing, nothing more than a random decision maker, something
that can be very useful for a beam bot. We're just talking about
scale here, present in single-dozen quantity they're just a handy
way to determine a robot's next move from possible alternatives,
quantum or not nothing really special will happen except for
subtle things like absorbing characteristics of the environment
slightly more efficiently than hard-wiring. According to quantum
theory (according to, I don't understand it enough to know if it's
right or not, just what the high-math people say) it takes almost
uncountable numbers of the Q-things to achieve the coherent
Q-effects that could give rise to consiousness, billions simply
will not do. Not even trillions.
> After all, using quantum mechanics for
>electronics
>and computation is becoming a pretty heavily researched thing these days.
>One significant step toward quantum computers has been reached recently here in
>Colorado where physicists have force atoms to appear in two different
>places at the
>same time.
Hehe neat trick... but is it real or is it just an illusion?
Also keep in mind that just because a computer operates quantumly
does not make it conscious or even that advanced. For the benefit
of those who don't know about Q-computing the idea is instead of
calculating step-by-step a Q-computer takes advantage of numbers
that can assume any state rather than having a specific value, so
they set it up and the answer just "falls out". Most of the focus
is in factoring large numbers, something that would break most
encryption schemes that depend on the product of large primes.
As far as I know, no one has actually produced such a thing.
But if they did, that still in no way makes it alive or anything
like that, it's a neat mathematical trick that takes advantage
of the fuzzier qualities of reality.
>So, if these two fields of research are combined, I don't see any reason
>why a
>human equivalent artificial life form could not be created. Sure it may be
>50-100 years
>away, but still possible.
Way off. If we can do 1 billion elements in a 100 years, multiply that
by about another billion or so (and that might be a way low estimate).
How long will that take? It took nature over 3 billion years to create
us and pack together the number of elements necessary to make something
alive and conscious of its environment... to think us dumb humans can
do it in 50-100 years is... no comment.
>Besides, if it can't be done, why are we and so many others trying?
They don't know any better?
It is ok to copy certain elements of life, make use of principles
that nature teaches us to make our little robots perform better.
But to attempt to fully duplicate the wonders of nature is
a futile effort. Best to learn the minor lessons, build our
bots just a little smarter and not get carried away with fiction.
>Loving this discussion,
Hopefully it's on-topic enough for the list to tolerate...
I'm trying to reduce the goals from being "human-like" to merely
being smarter, for then some of this stuff can actually be applied
using simple circuits. Wanted - a simple circuit that runs at
3 volts or less that generates a non-deterministic random outcome
for use as a robotic coin-flipper. Gated zener noise run to a
binary counter would be great but unfortunately 2V zeners don't
exist and it takes power-consuming analog to amplify. Next best
would be a gated high-frequency oscillator/counter that's
frequency varied with say light-level, can do that using a
circuit similar to one on my "walker brains" page. I do not
want this so that my robots can "think" but so they'll have
a very minimum level of free will. Let's stay real.
Terry Newton
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