timtyler comments on Questions and comments about Eliezer's Dec. 2 2013 Oxford speech - Less Wrong

3 Post author: NancyLebovitz 04 December 2013 05:50PM

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Comment author: timtyler 08 December 2013 12:04:33AM -1 points [-]

I didn't buy the alleged advantage of a noise free environment. We've known since von-Neumann's paper titled:

PROBABILISTIC LOGICS AND THE SYNTHESIS OF RELIABLE ORGANISMS FROM UNRELIABLE COMPONENTS

...that you can use unreliable computing components to perform reliable computation - with whatever level of precision and reliability that you like.

Plus the costs of attaining global synchrony and determinism are large and massively limit the performance of modern CPU cores. Parallel systems are the only way to attain large computing capacities - and you can't guarantee every component in a large parallel system will behave deterministically. So: most of the future is likely to lie with asynchronous systems and hardware indeterminism, rather contrary to Yudkowsky's claims.