Re: Interested in thoughts on this excerpt from Martin Rees

From: Russell Standish <r.standish.domain.name.hidden>
Date: Sun, 6 Aug 2006 18:56:39 +1000

On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 01:11:19PM +1000, Stathis Papaioannou wrote:
>
> Is it still correct to say that a computation running on two physical computers (that is, what
> we think of as physical computers, whatever the underlying reality may be) has almost twice
> the measure as it would have if it were running on one computer? Otherwise, there would
> be no point backing up anything, relying instead on Platonia's infinite hard disk.
>
> Stathis Papaioannou

It does not change the measure of the computation in Platonia. I think
that is the clear message from COMP. But it does change the measure
within the "physical" universe that we inhabit.

Backing up things is to improve robustness in the face of noise (or
equivalently the second law). I don't know of anybody doing it to
increase measure per se.

On the other hand printing 100 copies of my book is all about
increasing the measure of my book within our physical universe, and
not backing it up (5 copies distributed to the main libraries of the
world would suffice for that!)

Cheers

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Received on Tue Aug 08 2006 - 07:59:00 PDT