Planetary Mass Computers

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by Anaraxes

We'd finally have enough processing power to automate the spelling and grammar pedantry on the Internet.

Woah there pal! Let's not dive into Pure Fantasy!

My late father was an English Teacher - I have seen the sheer power of someone lecturing on the proper arrangement of "I" and "E" and justified uses of "to" and "too" at close enough range to sear my retinas.

Can even that much processing power actually simulate the sheer pedantry of thousands of nitpicking grammarians?

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

For some reason this just makes me laugh. The Precursors have descended to a lower plane of existence: they've been playing a video game for 40 million years.

And that, in turn, reminds me of Exalted and the Games of Divinity.
..

It doesn't have to be gaming simulations. It could be that for their level of physics, they need to perform insanely in depth long term simulations to render experiments safe. If we fly by the seat of our pants, we may cause local explosions. If a TL 12 dose so, it unmakes reality.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

Good point.

Actually, depending on whether vacuum decay can be triggered by nano-black holes, we might already have the ability to accidentally destroy the current universe with particle accelerators.

Playing with antimatter or zero point energy sources may be more likely to cause problems, though.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Vaevictis Asmadi

Actually, depending on whether vacuum decay can be triggered by nano-black holes, we might already have the ability to accidentally destroy the current universe with particle accelerators.

We aren't going to manage anything with particle accelerators that hasn't already happened many times in supernovae.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by johndallman

We aren't going to manage anything with particle accelerators that hasn't already happened many times in supernovae.

Are we really anywhere near that level? I assumed we were still in the "rare cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere" level.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Are we really anywhere near that level? I assumed we were still in the "rare cosmic rays hitting the upper atmosphere" level.

We're nowhere near the supernova level, or the most powerful cosmic rays that we know of.

[Vaevictis Asmadi]

I'm not suggesting it's likely, except in fiction. I know cosmic rays have a much greater chance of causing vacuum decay, and haven't yet that we know of. But we are talking about fiction.

[Refplace]

I'd most likely use such a thing as a McGuffin in a campaign.
That said I think a central processor and networking not at the center surrounded by a bunch of large processor networks with ever smaller sub networks and a lot of parallel tasks and and hand offs seems the most likely arrangement.
Also several data stores acting as a sort of cache memory for what an individual section is working on.

[AlexanderHowl]

When you have computers the size of planets, the level of simulation is rather astounding. While I doubt that human intelligences may be simulated below Complexity 10, such a computer could simulate hundreds of septillions of such intelligences. Even a perfect simulation of a person on the molecular level could probably be done by a Complexity 16 simulation, meaning that a computer of Complexity 33 could create a virtual star system identical to our own thousands of times over (assuming a molecular simulation of the entire star system would require Complexity 30). Of course, a molecular simulation would probably be unnecessary, but it would create a virtual star system indistinguishable from the real world.

[David Johansen]

Sadly, Windows 40000 is a complexity 32 program. Still, the graphics on Pong will be a little sharper.