Aliens Doing Forensic Analysis On The Program Code Found In Some Interstellar Spacecraft, Trying To Reverse Engineer What Kind Of Culture Would Make Such A Thing
Like Malware Analysis But The Source Code, Language, Author, Target, And Point Of Origin Are All Completely Unavailable
I'm Very Curious About How Aliens Would Structure Their Computers. Would They Be Completely Different? Are We Stuck In A Local Optimum In Terms Of Hardware And Software Design?
@SuricrasiaOnline
I don't think we're presently stuck; in classical computing people are experimenting with processors with huge banks of nonvolatile RAM, such that there ceases to be a meaningful distinction between RAM and Disk, and as Cache scales up, surely something will erase that distinction too.
Then there's FPGAs.
@ontploffing But even the idea of using binary code to do computation. Maybe there are other ways to do meaningful computation without using logic gates as the abstraction..
@SuricrasiaOnline @ontploffing I seem to recall ternary computers would have better energy consumption and deal with negative values a little more elegantly which might be nice for some computation tasks
@kellerfuchs @SuricrasiaOnline @ontploffing oh, right, that must have been where I got the titbit from
Still got the whole "for negative numbers use -1 instead of chucking another bit on there" thing though, that sounds pretty neat
@troubleMoney @SuricrasiaOnline @ontploffing
Not really?
The reason we do binary is because turning a physical quantity (voltage, current, pressure) to a logic level gets more ambiguous (and prone to errors) as you add logic states.
The Soviet Setun computer was a 50s trinary computer, which had lower power consumption than some alternatives at the time, but I'm not aware of string reasons to ascribe that to the use of trinary.
50s vintage computer design was definitely not at an optimum: we hadn't even invented VLSI, and the machines then were room-sized, guzzling tremendous amounts of energy :D
I'm kinda annoyed by the whole meme because it's being used to peddle a bunch of craptography, in particular by iota (a cryptocurrency)