I’ll go back now and correct the whole post!

But then the Planck volume should be about 10^-35 elevated to 3rd power cubic meters,
i.e. 10^-105 cubic meters; so 1 cubic meter contains about 10^+105 minimal cells for computation, not 10^+35.

This is a lot more, so in Planck time all the observable universe would be able to do about 10^184 or 10^185 operations, or about 10^221 ops per second (probably a little more, 10^227 with correct numbers).

You need about 10^238 operations, so you just have to wait for 10^11 seconds, or about 1000 years.
If we take into acocunt that our observable universe is probably only a part of the whole, then this figure could be further reduced

Amazing art, by the way! I greatly apreciated it!
Sorry for my geek stupidity and poor English

http://www.fqxi.org/community/forum/topic/556

Mark that’s interesting about the rendering…I was looking at two images of 8th degree-polynomial-generated 3D Mandelbrot-like fractals by Dan White today at Fractal Forums.

And thinking that you don’t have the color bands like in the 2D mandelbrot because everything you see in these images has the same escape iteration count…they’re all on the surface. And, yeah, if the stuff were translucent you could see nice colored fingers in there.

And, slightly more seriously, redslime, Hinton has his OFFICE down in one of those cracks! Like, around here:

[Image by Daniel White, see this twinbee post on Fractal Forums.]

Down inside one of those craterlike holes, in a balcony a third of the way up and then down a spiral hallway, with everything steadily shifting its shape and fresh doorways opening up, tunnels closing off, everything translucent with deep shades of color within.

Hinton’s waiting for SOMETHING, hard to be sure what, the image of his lost love? A shape so hideously eldritch ans to enrage the great Mind of Flimsy itself?

When pressed for more details, Hinton might offer this vaguely relevant quote from Alexander Pope’s poem, “Essay on Criticism.” I like the flow of this, and if you look in Wikipedia (where I found the quote), you can find out what the heck the Pierian spring is supposed to be. I see this verse as referring to higher-order Mandelbrots!

“A little learning is a dang’rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fir’d at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of Arts,
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;
But more advanc’d, behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleas’d at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o’er the vales, and seem to tread the sky,
Th’ eternal snows appear already past,
And the first clouds and mountains seem the last;
But, those attain’d, we tremble to survey
The growing labours of the lengthen’d way,
Th’ increasing prospects tire our wand’ring eyes,
Hills peep o’er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!”

But what if you need more interaction between distant elements. For example you might want to render your mandelblob with ray-tracing, and shading that depends on distant elements of the model/computer. One thought experiment to handle this would be to make the computer semi-transparent and use the sun to illuminate the geometrically accurate simulation, and some of the computational elements to block/transmit/scatter the natural lighting. But your refresh rate (.01 s) limits the size of your computer to about earth size, the distance that light travels in this amount of time. There’s no faster way to do this by any method, so a computer larger than the earth would fail at real time rendering.

There’s a related problem of scale. What happens when you want to rotate the rendered view. It seems that the fastest (least computationally intensive) way to do this is to move all the computational states, as if it is a physical object. Using a semi-transparent computer for ray-tracing requires the model elements to be spatially arranged isomorphically with the fractal set. You could move the viewpoint for the calculation, but then you need to move the sun too!

But an earth size computer system, even if it uses massless particles for computation, has a finite (and large) energy content (moment of inertia). So I’m wondering, when we get up to these scales of computation, do we have to worry about the computer being ripped from its foundation on such an operation? One might imagine that it is free floating, but if your going to change its angular momentum, you need a lever and firm ground to stand on. A mouse pad isn’t enough.

In my last novel, HYLOZOIC, this is exactly what happens. The alien Peng invade Earth, not by physicall coming here, but rather by getting some areas of our land to run computations that generate Peng birds as matter holograms.

But in JIM AND THE FLIMS, I’m going to take a less complex approach. Hinton has simply borrowed energy from some neighbors to run his fractal computations, and the only way to pay them back is to terminate everyone on Earth and liquidate their souls into kessence energy in Flimsy.

One way or another, it’s always handy in an SF novel to have some characters out to destroy all life on Earth!

I really like this post of yours.

Really it’s the search aspect that makes the things need so much crunch. Search is always the ballbuster in programming.

The reason I bring in the topic of time and animation, is that I want the computational demands of these displays to be ongoing. It’s like you want to be computing a fresh Variation on the 3D mandelbrot set a hundred times a second. And each successive frame is hard to compute as each time you have to search through the branching tree of all the possible next frames.

Real-time in this context means computing something as fast as you want to display it…with pre-rendering ruled out. The game here is to make the requirements so insanely high that you get something that’s physically impossible…so you have to borrow stuff from the Solsols and the Bulbers.

I prefer not to think of our universe as a simulation or a virtual machine. I think it’s more interesting to accept as, if you will, a computer that’s computing itself.