ThrustVectoring comments on New report: Intelligence Explosion Microeconomics - Less Wrong

45 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 April 2013 11:14PM

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Comment author: ThrustVectoring 29 April 2013 06:52:27PM 2 points [-]

I may have found a minor problem on page 50:

Better algorithms could decrease the serial burden of a thought and allow more thoughts to occur in serial rather than parallel

Shouldn't that be "allow more thoughts to occur in parallel rather than serial"? Turning a thought from multiple parallel sub-tasks to one serial task increases the serial burden of that thought, rather than decreasing it.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 April 2013 08:22:44PM 2 points [-]

The idea here is that you use parallelism to implement operations like caching which can decrease the number of serial steps required for a thought, so that more of them can occur one after another. In the simplest case, if you were already using a serial processor to emulate parallel computers, adding parallel power increases serial depth because you need no longer burn serialism to emulate parallelism.

Comment author: ThrustVectoring 29 April 2013 09:07:33PM 0 points [-]

Oh, so diverting serial processing cycles to get serial depth instead of getting half the depth over two independent tasks. I thought the sentence was saying something else entirely: that a better algorithm does the same thing except with higher serial depth over fewer processes.