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
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Reply-To: oster@dewey.soe.berkeley.edu.UUCP (David Phillip Oster)
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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