Re: AI's in full thrust

John Skelly writes:

@:) I think the new SUN system uses a whole bunch of "regular" CPU's
@:) working togethor to acomplish the same goal.
@:) 
@:) If you, or anyone else, have any sites on supercomputers ad
mainframes
@:) I'd appreciate it.

  Well I'm not a hardware person but I can read
www.sun.com/servers/hpc as well as anyone else.  That's the page that
discusses some of the high-end parallel supercomputers that Sun
makes.	The biggest one has 64 250-MHz UltraSPARC processors in it,
which is a lot.  I have one 100 MHz UltraSPARC on my desk and it's
pretty impressive.  Anyway that machine comes with 64 gig of memory
(not hard drive space, _memory_) and can handle 20 terabytes of disk
space.	These numbers are all very large and the price tag is too
(I've heard rumors of around $1M per) but the main thing is that it's
built largely out of off-the-shelf parts.  This is probably the kind
of thing you can expect for the future: systems becoming more and more
parallel and distributing their computations over more and more
processors.

 Hmmm... there might be some interesting rules in this.  Imagine a
computer-controlled spaceship that takes damage.  With every hull hit
(we can imagine), processing subsystems are destroyed.	Now the
computer has lots of these, so a few aren't a big deal, but as more
and more hits are taken, the machine gradually loses its ability to
control the ship.  Perhaps targeting is effected, or weapons
strength.  There might also be the possibility that some kind of
controller node is hit (maybe only on a threshold) so that some
function is completely, but only temporarily, lost.

  This might be a good way to insert AI (not that again!) driven
ships.	Make them superintelligent and superfast, so that they
normally get bonuses to hit, but make them subject to temporary
shutdowns and gradual degradation in performance.

-joachim