Scott_Aaronson comments on Natural Selection's Speed Limit and Complexity Bound - Less Wrong

4 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 04 November 2007 04:54PM

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Comment author: Scott_Aaronson 05 November 2007 05:16:58AM 0 points [-]

Eliezer, sorry for spamming, but I think I finally understand what you were getting at.

Von Neumann showed in the 50's that there's no in-principle limit to how big a computer one can build: even if some fraction p of the bits get corrupted at every time step, as long as p is smaller than some threshold one can use a hierarchical error-correcting code to correct the errors faster than they happen. Today we know that the same is true even for quantum computers.

What you're saying -- correct me if I'm wrong -- is that biological evolution never discovered this fact.

If true, this is a beautiful argument for one of two conclusions: either that (1) digital computers shouldn't have as hard a time as one might think surpassing billions of years of evolution, or (2) 25MB is enough for pretty much anything!