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 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 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.

These problems have polynomial time complexity, they don't asymptote. Linear programming, for instance has quadratic worst-case time complexity in the size of problem instance (and O(n^3.5) time complexity in the number of variables). For problems related to model checking (circuit value problem, Horn-satisfiability, type inference) approximate solutions don't seem particularly useful.

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.

Hm, I wasn't, except in the shift to the upload scenario where the speedup is not from executing regular algorithms (presumably anything capable of executing emulated brains at 365x realtime will have much better serial performan... (read more)

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Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

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Dragon Ball's Hyperbolic Time Chamber

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