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Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

forrestheller.com

191–200 of 209 posts

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#191
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Infinite precision is just analog's version of an infinitely-long tape.

But even with infinite precision, how do you build a universal analog computer? And how do you program it?

Any Turing machine is a (computable) function; and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885064X0... shows any computable function can be computed by a GPAC. Therefore, if you take any universal Turing machine, there exists a GPAC that computes that Turing machine; and it is programmable because you can change the input it would give to the emulated Turing machine. Sure it's inefficient due to the two layers of emulation, but it shows it's possible.

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#192
post #86
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - up until a few years ago it was easy to find by googling, but now google has degraded to the point where I can't manage it.

Do you mean this? https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 Searched "run linux on hard drive without cpu or ram" on Google - third result.

That looks like it, yeah. Nowhere on my first few pages of Google for that query, shrug.

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#193
post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But even with infinite precision, how do you build a universal analog computer? And how do you program it?

Any Turing machine is a (computable) function; and https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885064X0... shows any computable function can be computed by a GPAC. Therefore, if you take any universal Turing machine, there exists a GPAC that computes that Turing machine; and it is programmable because you can change the input it would give to the emulated Turing machine. Sure it's inefficient due to the two l…

Ah. TIL. Thanks!

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#194
post #75

So in 50 years the equivalent of a gpt4 training cluster from today's datacenters will fit in a cheap cable, and it will run over 100 times faster than a full cluster today.

I'd say even more impressive is that, given an ARM Cortex X4 runs at almost 100x the clock speed, up to 14 cores, has caches, branch prediction, floating point, specialized instructions, gpu, etc., it's probably 100000 times faster than the CYPD4225. So given GPT4 training took ~100 days, it means a typical cell phone equivalent in 50 years will be able to train a GPT4 equivalent from scratch in under a second.

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#195
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you mean this? https://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=1 Searched "run linux on hard drive without cpu or ram" on Google - third result.

Not everyone gets the same results. The closest I could find - with your search query - was #6, and it’s a Reddit conversation that contains this link. I don’t usually click on Reddit links. If you use DDG it’s nowhere to be found.

actually yeah sorry it was in a Reddit post. I usually do click on Reddit links, or add "reddit" into my query, as it makes Google much more useful.

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#196
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the top supercomputers, US national labs occupy most of the top 10. But they aren’t enormously larger than the others. They are also built of out of standard parts. I’m surprised that they are recent, I expected the government to be slow and behind. What do you expect US government to do with lots of computing power? I wouldn’t expect military to need supercomputers. Maybe the NSA would have a lot for…

> They are also built of out of standard parts. I’m surprised that they are recent, I expected the government to be slow and behind. Because the government isn't building them. They are Cray supercomputers, supplied by HPE. Not entirely built with standard parts. Proprietary interconnect and cooling system.

Infiniband is not a proprietary interconnect. Water is not a proprietary cooling system.

High scale is about using commodity components (hundreds of) thousands of times.

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#197
post #196
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They are also built of out of standard parts. I’m surprised that they are recent, I expected the government to be slow and behind. Because the government isn't building them. They are Cray supercomputers, supplied by HPE. Not entirely built with standard parts. Proprietary interconnect and cooling system.

Infiniband is not a proprietary interconnect. Water is not a proprietary cooling system. High scale is about using commodity components (hundreds of) thousands of times.

HPE Slingshot is not Infiniband and it is proprietary to HPE.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2008.08886.pdf

The cooling system is also proprietary to HPE. Not saying that other vendors don't offer their own liquid cooling systems.

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#198
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern fly-by-wire planes are said to have 12-way voting Do you have a source for that? Everything I've ever read about Airbus says the various flight control systems are doubly redundant (three units). Twelve sounds like it would be far beyond diminishing returns...

That was word of mouth. This website says 5 independent computers, of which 2 use different hardware and software so as not to fail in the same fashion. https://www.rightattitudes.com/2020/04/06/airbus-flight-cont... I'd imagine every computer relies on redundant stick/pedal encoders, which is how a 12-way notion appeared.

There's several subsystems that have backup functionality or piloting fallback available incase of subsystem failure, and subsystems have internal 2-weay or 3-way redundancy/voting. See eg https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/15234/how-does-...

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#199
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more complicated than that, in the link, they described it better: >> The microcontrollers, running on PowerPC processors, received three commands from the three flight strings. They act as a judge to choose the correct course of actions. If all three strings are in agreement the microcontroller executes the command, but if 1 of the 3 is bad, it will go with the strings that have previously been correct. This is…

> Byzantine Tolerant Concensus I was taken to task for mis-spelling "consensus"; I used to spell it with two 'c's and two 's's, like you. It was explained to me that it's from the same root as "consent", and that's how I remember the right spelling now.

Good point.

Re: Apollo 11 vs. USB-C Chargers (2020)

#200
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> is the game? Sure. One of the "Surprisingly Turing-Complete" examples is that "Magic: the Gathering: not just TC, but above arithmetic in the hierarchy ". See https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828 for the preprint "Magic: The Gathering is Turing Complete", https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/06/its-possible-to-buil... for an Ars Technica article, and https://hn.algolia.com/?q=magic+turing for the many HN submissions on…

mtg is more recent than things like the johnniac, but plausibly there's a traditional card game with the same criteria that predates electronic computation but then we have to ask thorny ontological questions: does a card game count if it requires a particular configuration to be turing-complete, but nobody ever played it in that configuration? what if nobody ever played the game at all? what if nobody even knew the…

The MtG preprint suggest people have been looking for such games but failed to identify any. From "Previous Work", first page, column 2:

> Prior to this work, no undecidable real games were known to exist. Demaine and Hearn (2009) [10] note that almost every real-world game is trivially decidable, as they produce game trees with only computable paths. They further note that Rengo Kriegspiel {Rengo Kriegspiel is a combination of two variations on Go: Rengo, in which two players play on a team alternating turns, and Shadow Go, in which players are only able to see their own moves.} is “a game humans play that is not obviously decidable; we are not aware of any other such game.” It is conjectured by Auger and Teytaud (2012) [1] that Rengo Kriegspiel is in fact undecidable, and it is posed as an open problem to demonstrate any real game that is undecidable.

> The approach of embedding a Turing machine inside a game directly is generally not considered to be feasible for real-world games [10].

Regarding your ontological question, that we don't know if something is Turning complete doesn't mean it isn't.

People explored the Game of Life before it was proven to be Turing complete. The 1970 SciAm article says "Conway conjectures that no pattern can grow without limit." so Martin and Gardner didn't even know about gliders then. People don't say GoL wasn't Turning complete in 1970.

I pointed to a 1998 paper claiming the Z3 machine from the 1940s was Turing complete, that author clearly believes that a particular physical configuration is not required.

Nor did Turing construct a physical representation for his paper.

FWIW, the MtG preprint gives a concrete example of a 60-card initial deck. I would be surprised if neither the authors nor anyone else has ever tried it.

The ontological question is even more fully resolved because no one has ever created a real Turing machine. We always have the proviso "if given enough memory".

Similarly, the video game "Minesweeper" is NP-complete as the size increases, and with an infinite board - clearly not physically realizable - is Turing complete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minesweeper_(video_game)#Compu...

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