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China may become the first country to turn on a 100 petaflops supercomputer, just one order of magnitude away from "exascale":
A little over one year ago, export blocks put in place by the US government threatened to derail China's plans to upgrade its Tianhe-2 supercomputer, the world's fastest since June 2013, to its originally planned peak capacity of 100 petaflops. At the time, many in the industry anticipated that the efforts to block China's supercomputing capability by banning access to US technology from Intel and other hardware vendors would backfire.
Indeed, China was sufficiently incentivized to redouble efforts on its homegrown supercomputing effort and it had the cash from the squashed Intel deal to do it. A couple months after news of the blacklist came out, China revealed plans to build not one, but two 100-petaflops supercomputers using a variety of native chip, accelerator and interconnect technologies. One of these systems was a fully-realized Tianhe-2, which was slated for a late-2016 launch.
VR World, the same publication who broke the blacklisting story last year, is now reporting that China is on track to announce a 100-petaflops supercomputer in June, during the 2016 International Supercomputing Conference in Frankfurt, Germany. China had originally said it would have such a system in late-2016, but this is the same country that launched its 33-petaflops (LINPACK) Tianhe-2 two years early.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Friday April 15 2016, @09:42PM
If one can get brain functionality with way less neurons then we should be way past the simulation point by now. The question then becomes when the software will be functioning. Any ideas?
Perhaps the Theseus paradox fools the reader a bit. If something has their functions replaced with the same functions. It is functionally the same. The catch comes when you have stuff like quantum mechanics etc where every dimensional cross point is unique and will not be repeated. So as long as the replacements are functionally equivalent it shouldn't matter. If a PC is implemented in FPGA, is it still a PC? I would say yes because it's deterministic. But once you have anything that is pathway dependent and is affected by environmental factors, it's in essence a random walk and never the same even if the starting point is a perfect copy. Two flowers with the same DNA and phenotype will have different outcomes despite a very similar start.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Friday April 15 2016, @10:56PM
Your body renews & replaces nearly every single cell about every 7 to 15 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqJWSyUbmkw [youtube.com]
Under your supposition, you are not the same person from 7 years ago and yet bill collectors would beg to differ.
You have a persistence of memory, a continuum of the experience of you being you (unless you don't in which case, seek immediate medical attention).
You believe yourself to be you. Ergo to you, you are you.
To the outside world you are also you, unless you're operating under a delusion of being someone else, in which case see my above comment about medical attention :)
To those who know you. You are still you, but this is a wholly different you than the canonical, definitive you, that you believe yourself to be.
It is a model of "you" that the others keep in their minds. This model is derived from what they know about you.
To us, you are the memory of our experiences and interactions with you.
My solution to the Theseus paradox.
You are nothing less and nothing more than the information that is you.
Information which has been fighting a never ending battle against entropy since before the first life forms emerged.
Everything else about you, is the form factor of the information carrier. The medium that allows the information to travel, mix, copy, increase in number and spread.
The carrier can change at any time and as long as the information that is you remains the same, then you remain the same.
Specifically addressing Theseus's ship.
It ceased being Theseus's ship the day Theseus ceased being aboard it.
The ship served as a carrier for Theseus, and it was the desire by others to keep Theseus's memory intact, which provided the onus for others to keep the ship intact in memoriam.
In other words, it was the memory of Theseus that drove others to keep the ship in good order and repair, but it had not been Theseus's ship in a very long time.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by bitstream on Saturday April 16 2016, @02:09AM
I may not be the same person, but I'm similar enough to pass as the same person. Everything changes, just not enough to be casually observed.
The other that you state means that if one can extract the memories, one can also duplicate the person good enough for a simulation at least.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 16 2016, @04:06AM
Yes exactly. Sort of. It's not JUST your memories, it's also how you synthesize them along with how you collate them given new sensory input.
The combined function of the previous information acting on new information whatever that information may be.
The question asked was "if we're past the simulation point from a technological standpoint then how long will it be until we are able to simulate a human mind in a computer?"
My answer to that is, "I believe we will never be able to simulate a human mind with current approaches because they focus on the carrier rather than the information being carried."
Once we sort out how to map the information itself to new machinery, then the simulation pathway becomes clear.
Similar to how we moved from film to digital for movies. Or mechanical computation devices and techniques to electronic computational techniques.
There was no electronic mimic of this, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curta [wikipedia.org] prior to the advent of fully electronic computers and electronic computational techniques are very different from mechanical devices that do the same thing. It turns out the math, it's input and it's output, was the thing that mattered and not the machine performing the computations.
However it now begs the question, at which point are you no longer yourself and suddenly just a very complex machine simulating you.
It's much more philosophical and meta-physical than valid hard science. It's not a theory, it doesn't predict anything. It's just a philosophy that I use to frame these questions because it feels like we're on the cusp of something new and different.
Yet I can't help but feeling like these are questions we will need to answer eventually.
Only time will prove me right or wrong, but I like taking about it because, before we can truly define artificial intelligence, we need to find a way to define intelligence.
An information driven approach might provide us something quantifiable and objective rather than the nearly completely subjective measures used today.
Although it's PopSci, here is something fascinating to watch and think about, there is some hard science backing it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=prfxjrz0_0k [youtube.com]
Time from 2:22 is particularly relevant to our discussion.
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Saturday April 16 2016, @08:12AM
There is no simulation just interpretations and similarities in varying degrees. Two perfect copies will take on a unique future. So copying will not make objects equal.
I seen documentaries about a neurosurgeon have an idea that our mind is a quantum computer at room temperature. He holds talks and writes papers on this. If it's quantum, then a fast computer isn't enough. I suspect in addition self feedback and random input is also part of what makes it work.
(Score: 2) by devlux on Saturday April 16 2016, @08:48AM
You're not alone in the "brain as quantum computer" camp.
See my response to toygeek over here... https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/04/16/0132245 [soylentnews.org]
Would love to see a link to your neurosurgeon though. I like to keep an open mind. But the question isn't "is this or is this not a quantum computer", because everything is a quantum computer. It's "to what effects do the non-intuitive quirks of quantum mechanics dominate the relevant computations which define us".
(Score: 2) by bitstream on Saturday April 16 2016, @04:24PM
Seems my memory was wrong. He's an Anesthetist. Here's some articles on him:
Stuart Hameroff, MD consciousness and microtubules in a quantum world. Interview by Bonnie Horrigan. [nih.gov], and Anesthetics act in quantum channels in brain microtubules to prevent consciousness. [nih.gov].
Search for: Stuart Hameroff, quantum, consciousness, microtubules
And you find the motherload..
I think he might be on to parts of the puzzle to create a thinking machine for real (AI). And a clue to room temperature quantum computing. Even plants succeeds with harnessing quantum processes without super labs. And it can be proved the the efficiency by with sun energy is absorbed and used.