Hacker News Reader

Comment by codeulike | Hacker News Reader

If you had a machine with infinite CPU power and infinite RAM you could _evolve_ an AI. Greg Egan wrote a great story about that: http://ttapress.com/553/crystal-nights-by-greg-egan/

Someone tries it, with mixed results.

View on HN

And what do you do after evolving it? We might have less luck dissecting it and figuring out how it works than we do with human brains. It would be a total black box. And the end product is highly adapted for the specific fitness function used to evaluate it and probably wouldn't be good on anything else.

After you evolve it, you talk to it and tell it you want an even better AI. Instant singularity!

Ah, but we weren't given infinite time also, so you might be able to evolve an AI, but it might take many millions of years (like it did with real life).

He said infinite CPU power which implies infinite number of iterations. In real life it would probably take a lot more than millions of years (because computers are too slow to simulate populations of millions of minds.)

Does infinite energy (as infinite CPU cycles) really translate into immediate time? My physics isn't great, but I thought energy was related to mass, while entropy was related to time.

Fortunately, with infinite processing and storage, time is irrelevant. :)

Flip the switch and you'll have real intelligence (as opposed to our lazy Approximate Intelligence) just in time for the immediate heat death of the universe.

Ask it quickly: can entropy be reversed?

Good idea, it might have time to say it: Nope ;)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com