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

A HTC would come with serious overhead costs too; the cooling is just the flip side of the electricity - a HTC isn't in Iceland and the obvious interpretation of a HTC as a very small pocket universe means that you have serious cooling issues as well (a years' worth of heat production to eject each opening).

Take P-complete problems, for instance. These are problems which are efficient (polynomial time) on a sequential computer, but are conjectured to be inherently difficult to parallelize (the NC != P conjecture). This class contains problems of practical interest, notably linear programming and various problems for model checking. Being able to run these tasks overnight instead of in one year would a significant advantage.

I'm not sure how much of an advantage that would be: there are pretty good approximations for some (most/all?) problems like linear programming (remember Grötschel's report citing a 43 million times speedup of a benchmark linear programming problem since 1988) and such stuff tends to asymptote. How much of an advantage is running for a year rather than the otherwise available days/weeks? Is it large enough to pay for a year of premium HTC computing power?

a HTC isn't in Iceland and the obvious interpretation of a HTC as a very small pocket universe means that you have serious cooling issues as well (a years' worth of heat production to eject each opening).

Of course given that the HTC is a fictional device you can always imagine arbitrary issues that make it uneconomical. I was considering the HTC just as a computer that had 365x the serial speed of present day computers, and considering whether there would be economically interesting batch (~1 day long) computations to run on it.

I'm not sure how much o

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Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

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Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

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