Matrioshka Brains: computing at the limits of physics | Hacker News Reader

Matrioshka Brains: computing at the limits of physics

aeiveos.com

47 pointsmotters26 comments

I'd like to note that this is probably the biggest borderline-plausible hard SF idea not to have caught on (at least on a large scale) in genre fiction. And that I shamelessly strip-mined Mr Bradbury's mountain of ideas for props in "Accelerando".

(In case you were wondering where SF writers get their ideas from ...)

Of course it has. Dyson Spheres are famous in SF. The Matrioshka Brains are just distant relatives of the same.

Wow, Charles Stross, I didn't know you were on HN. I'm a big fan. I love the sheer intensity of your work. Props!

Heh, I wanted to post a comment pointing out that anyone who likes this article should definitely read Accelerando... Great book, thanks for writing it! :-)

It is a shame they haven't caught on, but I believe there's a positive-feedback mechanism in advertising these ideas. Once an ingenious idea is made, it is only disseminated to a smaller percentage of people. One of these people then has to be inspired enough by the idea to borrow from the original creator.

If the idea is borrowed, it is likely to live on for longer. If it gets borrowed in a movie, the idea will go global due to the sheer amount of people who will receive the idea compared to reading a sci/fi book.

Once the idea has been spread enough, it will get borrowed enough. Before Asimov, robots were basically a chromed Frankenstein. However, now it's rare and rather dated to see a Frankenbot. Now it's typically benevolent robot/AI hurts humanity to help it, which was a frequent element in Asimov's own work.

Megastructures haven't really appeared in Hollywood movies before. There was the Deathstar and the planetary ring in Verhoeven's Starship Troopers, aside from that I seriously can't think of another without seriously stretching it. So until we see an actual-factual ringworld or dyson spheres, which are far more recognised ideas, I doubt we'll see a matrioshka brain, even though it has the biggest uses.

Probably because it's so improbable. It essentially assumes that we'll hit the limits of technological innovation without discovering that any of our current ideas about physics and the nature of the universe are completely wrong.

Long before we could ever make such a device I suspect we'll discover something along the lines of zero-point energy being real harvestable, that the universe is not in fact material and local, etc. I'm sure there are thousands more possibilities. And any one of them being true would make this device completely obsolete way before our technology advances to a point where we can create it.

The universe is in fact not 'material' in some senses of the word. We already know that information / entropy is as least as real as energy and matter. And there are some hints that they may be even more fundamental.

http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/03/reminder...

Respect.

One of the things I like about HN is all the neat people on here. On the things I love about HN is all the people I see here who I'd like to know!

One would imagine that on a Dyson sphere sized computer, intercommunication (limited by speed of light) will become major bottleneck. At some point amassing components will stop winning you performance due to physical dimensions.

If you're pooling enough people's resources to make a machine that big, you're probably going to get enough independent tasks to make good use of it too.

Yes, lightspeed is a bottleneck. A particular problem is that the computing elements are presumably vulnerable to radiation damage, thus placing a lower limit on the internal radius of the MB's innermost shell. If MBs are migratory, that's a good reason for expecting them to be associated with cooler, dimmer red dwarf stars -- or to be concentrated some way away from their stellar energy source, leaving a classical Dyson sphere in place to harvest energy and beam it to them via laser or maser.

(This stuff got chewed over a lot on the extropians list in the early 90s, when the subject of "Jupiter Brains" -- what you get if you dismantle Jupiter and turn it into computing material -- was first raised. Googling on "neuron star" might provide some transitory amusement ...)

I found your exposition on the other limit--bandwidth outside the brain--even more interesting. Assuming life expands to fill the available resources, once you create a Matrioshka brain you're pretty irrevocably tied to your star, for good or for ill.

You might still want to send out `seeds' to other stars. Even if you can't communicate with them fully.

I think that limitation would become a major bottleneck long before you reach Dyson sphere size. Internode communication is already the major bottleneck for modern supercomputers, which limits the possibly achievable computational speed for every problem except for strictly parallellizable problems that do not require such internode communication.

http://home.fnal.gov/~carrigan/infrared_astronomy/Fermilab_s...

The link above is to a fermi lab program to look for Dyson spheres. The Matrioshka brain is a subset of the Dyson sphere. Something made famous, unfortunately, by Trekkers.

Why is that unfortunate?

Science fiction fandom snobbery.

Perhaps the association to science fiction removes perceived rigor from the idea.

Unfortunate because it has distorted the original idea beyond recognition. :) A lot of people know F. J. Dyson only for Dyson "spheres" (the original conception was that of a swarm, SF modified the idea to a sphere, then shell). Though it's obvious he did a lot of other work and that the Dyson sphere was nothing as compared to what he has done. It was just a thought experiment.

"Jim Von Ehr, the president of Zyvex LLC, has publicly stated that he believes that Zyvex will be able to do diamondoid nanoassembly by 2010."

oops guess they missed their deadline. i would like to see a graph of how these predicted dates keep receding as a counterpoint to all the exponential graphs of progress.

Humans looking for extraterrestrial intelligence might be looking for intelligence "similar" to humans, but might not "mega-intelligences" also be looking for things similar to what spawned them (i.e. similar to human level intelligences)?

Hey Zyvex, it's 2010. How's my diamondoid nanoassembly coming along?

Drexler Sayeth:

Contrary to popular opinion, diamond synthesis seems almost irrelevant to progress toward advanced nanosystems. At the current stage or research, it is both difficult and unnecessary.

The current view is that we're ready to start work on a first generation of nanoassembly tools using designed proteins for tooltips and DNA scaffolds for programmable, atomically precise structure. The trouble is that it doesn't look like a first generation of molecular manufacturing tools are just around the corner, so the research isn't getting done.

http://metamodern.com/2008/12/27/toward-advanced-nanosystems...

how much will it cost to buy a solar-scale matrioshka brain? will it improve one's sex life and\or social status?

i hope no one is taking this seriously, becayse the logic/"science" presented here is well... science fiction i guess.

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