Supercomputers break petaflop barrier, still more useful than modern filosofy

[Asher]

Originally posted by GePap
Yeah, and a big thumbs up to private charity and their central role in your rise

That makes no sense, but why should it? I'm just impressed your sentence was grammatically correct! You people can do anything you set your minds to!

[Asher]

Originally posted by Kuciwalker


This is hilariously wrong.

I'm sure it's correct in GePap's world, where an "engineer" is a sanitation worker under contract to the city.

GePap is no doubt one of those management heroes who takes complaints of the REAL WORLD'S CITIZENS about the REAL WORLD'S PROBLEMS such as a backed up sewage line. He swoops into actions and orders his armies of "engineers" to remedy the situation. FEAR HIS POWER.

[Elok]

I imagine he's researched the issue exhaustively by reading every last one of Michael Crichton's novels...

[Boris Godunov]

At least he doesn't think all engineers do is drive trains.

[GePap]

Oh, you guys are so cute when you get together and act like you matter.

[Krill]

I love it when idiots try to troll

[Ben Kenobi]

Really, though, the ethics of sentient AI life is not as complex as some people think. Asimov basically got 90% of it, and he was a fuddy-duddy writer.

I can't wait for Asher's to tell his own robomaid that they should always obey him.

Honestly, once you've got sentience and mobility then there isn't much you can do.

[Ben Kenobi]

If they're already smarter than us they won't need to be pretentious to think they're our superiors. So why would they want philosophy?

They'd make their own.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Ben Kenobi


I can't wait for Asher's to tell his own robomaid that they should always obey him.

Honestly, once you've got sentience and mobility then there isn't much you can do.

That's not true -- people have sentience and mobility and look how obedient they are to patently outrageous ideas like religion.

You seem to ascribe to the concept that there's a magical "sentience" switch. That's not how intelligent AI will be designed. I'm not going to bother to explain further to someone who probably thinks computers work on the principle of magic, gay marriage is going to prevent babies from being born leading to the downfall of humanity, and McCain had a reasonable chance of winning the '08 election.

[Ben Kenobi]

That's not true -- people have sentience and mobility and look how obedient they are to patently outrageous ideas like religion.

If sentient robots obey authority as well as people do, then I don't see why you are so confident that giving them laws is going to keep them from killing you.

You seem to ascribe to the concept that there's a magical "sentience" switch.

Quite the opposite. Once they have intelligence we aren't going to be able to shut it off.

That's not how intelligent AI will be designed. I'm not going to bother to explain further to someone who probably thinks computers work on the principle of magic, gay marriage is going to prevent babies from being born leading to the downfall of humanity, and McCain had a reasonable chance of winning the '08 election.

I'd wager even money on Obama not making it to his inaugeration.

[Kuciwalker]

The best part of this is if you consider the original exchange:

Originally posted by Elok
Really. Do you mean that, if somebody like Asher designed a superintelligent self-aware computer, knowing full well what it was capable of, s/he would make it mobile and therefore independent? ...

Originally posted by Gepap
Engineers are employees - they don't make the decisions of what does or doesn't get built. At best, they can tell those who decide (those in power) what is feasible or not, and what the costs would be.

i.e. "those in power" (e.g. GePap) would be the idiots who decided to give the superintelligent self-aware computer mobility in our doomsday scenario.

[Asher]

This is related in two ways: The subject matter of the thread, and it's something GePap has no hope of understanding:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081120/sc_afp/sciencephysicseinstein_081120235605

e=mc2: 103 years later, Einstein's proven right

PARIS (AFP) – It's taken more than a century, but Einstein's celebrated formula e=mc2 has finally been corroborated, thanks to a heroic computational effort by French, German and Hungarian physicists.

A brainpower consortium led by Laurent Lellouch of France's Centre for Theoretical Physics, using some of the world's mightiest supercomputers, have set down the calculations for estimating the mass of protons and neutrons, the particles at the nucleus of atoms.

According to the conventional model of particle physics, protons and neutrons comprise smaller particles known as quarks, which in turn are bound by gluons.

The odd thing is this: the mass of gluons is zero and the mass of quarks is only five percent. Where, therefore, is the missing 95 percent?

The answer, according to the study published in the US journal Science on Thursday, comes from the energy from the movements and interactions of quarks and gluons.

In other words, energy and mass are equivalent, as Einstein proposed in his Special Theory of Relativity in 1905.

The e=mc2 formula shows that mass can be converted into energy, and energy can be converted into mass.

By showing how much energy would be released if a certain amount of mass were to be converted into energy, the equation has been used many times, most famously as the inspirational basis for building atomic weapons.

But resolving e=mc2 at the scale of sub-atomic particles -- in equations called quantum chromodynamics -- has been fiendishly difficult.

"Until now, this has been a hypothesis," France's National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) said proudly in a press release.

"It has now been corroborated for the first time."

For those keen to know more: the computations involve "envisioning space and time as part of a four-dimensional crystal lattice, with discrete points spaced along columns and rows."

[Kuciwalker]

KH already explained how that article was FOS.

[KrazyHorse]

It is fos, but the actual result (or at least what I'm assuming the result is) is at least moderately interesting, and probably did involve a lot of computing power.

[KrazyHorse]

Hey, I never noticed before but there's a quarter on top of those waffles (in your avatar). Is that some kind of joke? I don't get it.