Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

gwern

A time dilation tool from an anime is discussed for its practical use on Earth; there seem surprisingly few uses and none that will change the world, due to the severe penalties humans would incur while using it, and basic constraints like Amdahl's law limit the scientific uses. A comparison with the position of an Artificial Intelligence such as an emulated human brain seems fair, except most of the time dilation disadvantages do not apply or can be ameliorated and hence any speedups could be quite effectively exploited. I suggest that skeptics of the idea that speedups give advantages are implicitly working off the crippled time dilation tool and not making allowance for the disanalogies.

Master version on gwern.net

A time dilation tool from an anime is discussed for its practical use on Earth; there seem surprisingly few uses and none that will change the world, due to the severe penalties humans would incur while using it, and basic constraints like Amdahl's law limit the scientific uses. A comparison with the position of an Artificial Intelligence such as an emulated human brain seems fair, except most of the time dilation disadvantages do not apply or can be ameliorated and hence any speedups could be quite effectively exploited. I suggest that skeptics of the idea that speedups give advantages are implicitly working off the crippled time dilation tool and not making allowance for the disanalogies.

Master version on gwern.net

But I’m not sure how many real-world problems there are of high economic value which can soak up a year of serial processing.

Think of any real-world problem that takes one day on modern hardware. When computers were 365 times slower (that is, 12 - 13 years ago), it would have taken one year to solve such problems.

Don't you think there is any real-world problem that would benefit from 365x faster hardware, even if you can interact with it only once a day?

(Even if individual tasks take less than one year to complete, you can pool several of them and run them serially on the 365x computer)

Most of the examples people would come up with of extremely compute-intensive tasks are parallel algorithms, and those would be cheaper to run in the real-world on server farms which do not need self-contained powersources fitting in an HTC or similar special setups or attendants paid handsomely to be willing to spend a year isolated in the prison of HTC. There's simply no reason to take a highly parallel task and run it in an HTC when you can get the same result at less cost and less latency by running it on a perfectly normal server farm or cloud computi... (read more)

1Lightwave14y

Doesn't circuit design (and therefore computer processor design) require fairly large computational resources (for mathematical modelling)? Thus faster hardware now can be used to create even faster hardware.. faster.

6RomanDavis14y

The first thing that comes to mind is evolutionary algorithms, which eat up tons of ram and keeping running at a decent pace while keeping track of dozens variables is an enormous engineering challenge.

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Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

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Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

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