61–70 of 80 posts
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that's not correct, they are owned by MIT.
Thanks you're right. The important idea I was remembering is that they have no editorial connection to the university; they're just an investment.
A reason why I allow myself some skepticism on the feasibility of quantum computing is that if it were possible, I would have expected evolution to have used it somehow. If it turns out that protein folding really use a quantum computation, I'll move quantum computers from the "too good to be true" category to the "probably revolutionary stuff that I will see in my lifetime" alongside with nuclear fusion and strong A…
In a way, your argument makes the same mistakes that it claims these scientists are making.
> strong AI
I'm not sure what you're arguing here; evolution has achieved this in the form of the human mind. I strongly doubt we are as close as some believe to creating SAI, certainly not in the lifetime of any living human being, but arguments that hinge on natural demonstrations require that this is eventually possible.
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Yup the biology bit is hocus pocus. If you read the single author arxiv paper referenced, its thinking is quite confused on the biology. The main thing discussed is hydrogen bonding between nucleotide pairs which doesn't fit the magic numbers. Then in an odd Q and A section its eluded to that mrna-trna interactions do, therefore it must be. Already the different bond lengths of the hydrogen bonding is known to be par…
I was also confused about the assertion that biologists dismissed quantum mechanic's affects on biological systems. Biochemists have known about this phenomenon for decades , including photosynthesis.
This article mentions a controversy on the topic: https://physicsworld.com/a/is-photosynthesis-quantum-ish/
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Technically yes but what I mean is: Are there organisms that shape that sound into a tightly focused beam, to be able to only address the receivers they aim at?
Bats, dolphins. Dolphins even used focused beams of high intensity sound to stun fish, I believe.
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This argument proves too much. By that same argument, nuclear fission, ordinary CPUs, steam engines, rockets, helicopters, jets, X-rays, radio waves, superconductivity, superfluidity, air conditioning, liquid helium, liquid nitrogen, the Haber process, the fractional quantum Hall effect, Doppler cooling, graphene, long-distance satellite communication, gravitational waves, and GPS corrections for relativity all don't…
I think in your list of examples there are plenty of cases where nature, while not building the exact thing uses the same underlying principles. There are a lot of seeds that are aerodynamic so that they get spread more widely for example. Even seeds that have controlled falls due to "autorotation" But of course on planet earth at least it is hard for nature to use things requiring too high or low temperatures. Natur…
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> Are there organisms that use geometry to shape sound to send a signal? Wouldn’t this include pretty much any animal than can vocalise?
Technically yes but what I mean is: Are there organisms that shape that sound into a tightly focused beam, to be able to only address the receivers they aim at?
A reason why I allow myself some skepticism on the feasibility of quantum computing is that if it were possible, I would have expected evolution to have used it somehow. If it turns out that protein folding really use a quantum computation, I'll move quantum computers from the "too good to be true" category to the "probably revolutionary stuff that I will see in my lifetime" alongside with nuclear fusion and strong A…
A bit of a further tangent but: I continue to believe that it's very likely that brains somehow leverage quantum computing. The human brain is able to accomplish computational tasks on only around 40 watts of power that destroy what we can accomplish using pretty much any known machine learning algorithm using tens or even hundreds of thousands of watts of power. Maybe our algorithms are primitive or wrong, or maybe…
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A bit of a further tangent but: I continue to believe that it's very likely that brains somehow leverage quantum computing. The human brain is able to accomplish computational tasks on only around 40 watts of power that destroy what we can accomplish using pretty much any known machine learning algorithm using tens or even hundreds of thousands of watts of power. Maybe our algorithms are primitive or wrong, or maybe…
Illogical. 40watt computers can also do things that destroy what human brains can do. I can load up a raspberry pi with logic to control robots and apply computer vision models and do some pattern learning. And the power of software is still rapidly improving. And computers can run on much lower power too, and likely even lower in future. There is no particular reason to believe that quantum is what makes brains work…
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This argument proves too much. By that same argument, nuclear fission, ordinary CPUs, steam engines, rockets, helicopters, jets, X-rays, radio waves, superconductivity, superfluidity, air conditioning, liquid helium, liquid nitrogen, the Haber process, the fractional quantum Hall effect, Doppler cooling, graphene, long-distance satellite communication, gravitational waves, and GPS corrections for relativity all don't…
> nuclear fission https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto... For pretty much every thing you list, nature has something pretty close to it in it. Even nuclear fission.
It's unlikely that enzymes could catalyse fission reactions. It would be amazing if they could...
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I think in your list of examples there are plenty of cases where nature, while not building the exact thing uses the same underlying principles. There are a lot of seeds that are aerodynamic so that they get spread more widely for example. Even seeds that have controlled falls due to "autorotation" But of course on planet earth at least it is hard for nature to use things requiring too high or low temperatures. Natur…
If your standards are low enough that you would say superconductivity appears in nature, then quantum computing certainly does.
So, no, superconductivity probably does not exist in nature