Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT

WCDT Strips 3236 - 3240 (6-10 June 2016)

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BenRG:
I'm not sure where Jeph is going with this.

In part, I'm sure it is Faye just trying to keep the conversation with Bubbles going (stopping her from just shutting down and putting up social walls is a bit of an effort, or so I am made to understand by the strips). However, I also get the feelig that Jeph has been toying for some time with an 'AI social crisis' meta-plot similar to but not connected in any continuity terms to that in the deep background of Alice Grove.

On the actual subject under discussion, I remember reading somewhere that the more nodes in an arbitrarily large network, the slower it gets simply because of the processing power required to co-ordinate so many distributed processors. I suppose that, eventually, you reach a critical limit where the amount of processing power the system needs to manage its physical processing resources is greater per added node than the amount that any node can add to the overall system, no matter how advanced or capable it is. The whole system becomes bogged down in administrative data that the system needs to co-ordinate itself.

Simply put, a society of like-minded individuals working to a common goal remains a more efficient architecture than a single mind distributed over many nodes.

brasca:
I thought Faye was talking about a gestalt like what would happen if Bubbles, May, Momo, Pintsize, and Winslow united into one really big robot. 

Three guesses as to what part Pintsize would be and the first two don't count. 

anahata:

--- Quote from: BenRG on 08 Jun 2016, 22:58 ---On the actual subject under discussion, I remember reading somewhere that the more nodes in an arbitrarily large network, the slower it gets simply because of the processing power required to co-ordinate so many distributed processors.

--- End quote ---

It's a reworking of Brookes's Law: "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later"

snubnose:

--- Quote from: BenRG on 08 Jun 2016, 22:58 --- [...] I suppose that, eventually, you reach a critical limit where the amount of processing power the system needs to manage its physical processing resources is greater per added node than the amount that any node can add to the overall system, no matter how advanced or capable it is. The whole system becomes bogged down in administrative data that the system needs to co-ordinate itself. [...]
--- End quote ---
No thats not possible. The computational time needed to manage a network of N nodes grows with at most O(log (n)).

Basically if you want to send a command through your network, you can send it from your starter node to another, then you two nodes each send it to another, then these four nodes send it to another, etc. Since for organizing command we talk about rather basic commands like "check availability" or "upload this operating system" or "search for X nodes with free processing time" or "start this program", and there isnt a single task that needs to be done sequentially, all such operations can be done in quite a short time even for really high amounts of nodes.

Lets say you're having a computer with 2 power 64 = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 nodes, then sending a comand to ALL these nodes still only requires 64 steps.

However, for actual computations this is different. Many computations cannot be distributed - for every step of the computation you need the previous result. Even for those algorithms that can be distributed there is an upper limit of whats meaningful to do.

Or lets be more precise: larger computers can ALWAYS compute more. However the individual computation wont get faster at a certain point. For many algorithms, this point is already archieved with N = 2, because they cannot be parallelized at all.

Is it cold in here?:
Where does the global meta-AI fit into this, and wasn't it established that the big AIs have already taken over the world?

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