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Strange7 comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong
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Hmm, ok, my Nanodevil's Advocate persona doesn't have a good answer to this one. Perhaps some SIAI folks would like to step in and pick up the slack ?
I'm afraid not.
Actually, as someone with background in Biology I can tell you that this is not a problem you want to approach atoms-up. It's been tried, and our computational capabilities fell woefully short of succeeding.
I should explain what "woefully short" means, so that the answer won't be "but can't the AI apply more computational power than us?". Yes, presumably it can. But the scales are immense. To explain it, I will need an analogy.
Not that long ago, I had the notion that chess could be fully solved; that is, that you could simply describe every legal position and every position possible to reach from it, without duplicates, so you could use that decision tree to play a perfect game. After all, I reasoned, it's been done with checkers; surely it's just a matter of getting our computational power just a little bit better, right?
First I found a clever way to minimize the amount of bits necessary to describe a board position. I think I hit 34 bytes per position or so, and I guess further optimization was possible. Then, I set out to calculate how many legal board positions there are.
I stopped trying to be accurate about it when it turned out that the answer was in the vicinity of 10^68, give or take a couple orders of magnitude. That's about a billionth billionth of the TOTAL NUMBER OF ATOMS IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. You would literally need more than our entire galaxy made into a huge database just to store the information, not to mention accessing it and computing on it.
So, not anytime soon.
Now, the problem with protein folding is, it's even more complex than chess. At the atomic level, it's incredibly more complex than chess. Our luck is, you don't need to fully solve it; just like today's computers can beat human chess players without spanning the whole planet. But they do it with heuristics, approximations, sometimes machine learning (though that just gives them more heuristics and approximations). We may one day be able to fold proteins, but we will do so by making assumptions and approximations, generating useful rules of thumb, not by modeling each atom.
I would think it would be possible to cut the space of possible chess positions down quite a bit by only retaining those which can result from moves the AI would make, and legal moves an opponent could make in response. That is, when it becomes clear that a position is unwinnable, backtrack, and don't keep full notes on why it's unwinnable.
This is more or less what computers do today to win chess matches, but the space of possibilities explodes too fast; even the strongest computers can't really keep track of more than I think 13 or 14 moves ahead, even given a long time to think.
Merely storing all the positions that are unwinnable - regardless of why they are so - would require more matter than we have in the solar system. Not to mention the efficiency of running a DB search on that...
Actually, with proper design, that can be made very quick and easy. You don't need to store the positions; you just need to store the states (win:black, win:white, draw - two bits per state).
The trick is, you store each win/loss state in a memory address equal to the 34-byte (or however long) binary number that describes the position in question. Checking a given state is then simply a memory retrieval from a known address.
I suspect that with memory on the order of 10^70 bytes, that might involve additional complications; but you're correct, normally this cancels out the complexity problem.
The storage space problem is insurmountable. However searching that kind of database would be extremely efficient (if the designer isn't a moron). The search speed would have a lower bound of very close to (diameter of the sphere that can contain the database / c). Nothing more is required for search purposes than physically getting a signal to the relevant bit, and back, with only minor deviations from a straight line each way. And that is without even the most obvious optimisations.
If your chess opponent is willing to fly with you in a relativistic rocket and you only care about time elapsed from your own reference frame rather than the reference frame of the computer (or most anything else of note) you can even get down below that diameter / light speed limit, depending on your available fuel and the degree of accelleration you can survive.