The Infinity Machine [entries|reading|network|archive]
simont

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Fri 2008-04-18 09:52
The Infinity Machine
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[identity profile] lionsphil.livejournal.comSat 2008-04-19 11:14
Search the space of all possible machine designs until you find the one which is the Infinity Machine.

I feel like I'm sidestepping the "nobody will ever get their hands on one ever again", but if one can exist in the universe, that should be repeatable.

Might need to build a few Dyson spheres to power the thing, but once you have one, you can fill it with infinite infinite VMs (ridiculous politics notwithstanding).
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[personal profile] simontSat 2008-04-19 11:51
You're the second person to suggest that (the first was off-LJ). The trouble with it is that it's fundamentally a physics problem to find a way to perform infinite computation in a finite time in the real world; but the Infinity Machine has no innate knowledge of physics. So you'd have to start by telling it the laws of physics in order for it to be able to use them to test a machine design – and we don't know all the laws of physics yet, so all we could feed in would be our current best guess, in which case there'd be a good chance of it producing output that wouldn't really work, or (perhaps worse) ruling out a design which would.
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