Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!dewey.soe.berkeley.edu!oster From: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu (David Phillip Oster) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures Subject: Re: what to do with all those MIPS Message-ID: <23951@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> Date: 7 May 88 17:52:42 GMT References: <3bbda74b.44e6@apollo.uucp| <15368@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU> <23924@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <5157@bloom-beacon.MIT.EDU> Sender: usenet@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster) Organization: School of Education, UC-Berkeley Lines: 54 In a previous posting I described a workstation that uses simple, well known algorithms to produce a virtual 3-d (visual, audio, and tactile) workspace. The i/o devices required are in existence today, and can be had for under $1k total. The only problem is, it needs about 2000 MIPS to give usable performance. Once you give me that, I've got a design beyond that for a workstation that can easily soak up 2,000,000 MIPS. It requires a small advance in fabrication technology for its main i/o subsystem, and it is, of course, more speculative: being further out, the design isn't as solid. I want to live in society somewhat more advanced than this one. I'm putting my efforts into making that happen as quickly as possible, but I see it as an on-going process, not a _single_ problem to be solved for all time. I have some programs I want to run that require to many MIPs for me to get the interactive repsonse I need. Give me that, and I may _want_ more, but I'll still be better off than I am now, and will still have the benefit of being able to run those programs. I see these tools as amplifiers for the creative part of the human mind. Obviously, having good creativity amplifiers makes it easy to be creative, by definition. Among the uses of creativity is: designing better creativity amplifiers. Note the positive feedback here. Eric Drexler's book "Engines of Creation" describes the domain that I'd be building tools in, once I get the ones I've described here. (Cad/Modelling systems that model systems at the molecule level.) Vernor Vinge's book "Marooned in Real-Time" is novel about a community of time travellers, with a magic "stasis field" that lets them freeze themselves for years at a time: they have one-way time travel, into the future only. As the book opens, the positive feedback process has completed, except for the village of time travellers, humanity as we know it is completely gone. There are some fascinating, enticing descriptions, told as flashbacks, of what the world was like in the years on the steepest part of the exponential creativity curve. Of course, the higher up the curve you go, the harder it is to write a story comprehensible to _us_ poor unenhanced people. (The statis field is magic in the sense that the physical principles that underly it don't percolate throughout the society. Example: What kind of motors and batteries are the equivalent of muscle in Asimov's robots? Name three ways that same technology is used in other forms in his novels. Real world example: the same physics that give us laser weopons also gives us laser disks (CDs).) Now, if I can't get the MIPS, I can waste my time trying to come up with tricks to recognize and optimize special cases in algorithms that are perfectly straightforward in the general case. Just don't try to cast blame on me by telling me the bottleneck is software. I've got the software, just sitting on the shelf waiting for the MIPS to run it. Copyright (c) 1988 by David Phillip Oster, All Rights Reserved --- David Phillip Oster --When you asked me to live in sin with you Arpa: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu --I didn't know you meant sloth. Uucp: {uwvax,decvax,ihnp4}!ucbvax!oster%dewey.soe.berkeley.edu