Building emulators is hard. But I think it isn’t quite so hard as that, these days. Apple has now done it twice, and been able to run a really quite large subset of Mac software after each transition. Virtual machines are reasonably straightforward engineering at this point. Things like the JVM or the Microsoft common language runtime are basically emulators for an abstract virtual machine—and they’re quite robust these days with very small performance penalties. All these are certainly very large software engineering projects—but they’re routine engineering, not megaprojects, at this stage.
Further, I suspect the human brain is less sensitive than software to minor details of underlying platform. Probably small changes in the physics model correspond to small changes in temperature, chemical content, etc. And an emulation that’s as good as a slightly feverish and drunk person would still be impressive and even useful.
No they didn’t. At least one of those times was actually the software I described above, bought from the company I worked for. So I know exactly how hard it was to create.
“Things like the JVM or the Microsoft common language runtime are basically emulators for an abstract virtual machine”—which the engineers themselves get to specify, design and implement,
“Further, I suspect the human brain is less sensitive than software to minor details of underlying platform. ”
I would love to live in a world where re-implementing an algorithm that runs on meat, so it runs on silicon instead, amounted to a ‘minor detail of underlying platform’. I live i this one, however.
re-implementing an algorithm that runs on meat, so it runs on silicon instead, amounted to a ‘minor detail of underlying platform’. I live i this one, however.
I had assumed we were talking about low-level emulation: the program explicitly models each neuron, and probably at a lower level than that. And physical simulation is a well understood problem and my impression is that the chemists are pretty good at it.
Trying to do some clever white-box reimplementation of the algorithm I agree is probably intractable or worse. The emulation will be very far from the optimal implementation of the mind-program in question.
Building emulators is hard. But I think it isn’t quite so hard as that, these days. Apple has now done it twice, and been able to run a really quite large subset of Mac software after each transition. Virtual machines are reasonably straightforward engineering at this point. Things like the JVM or the Microsoft common language runtime are basically emulators for an abstract virtual machine—and they’re quite robust these days with very small performance penalties. All these are certainly very large software engineering projects—but they’re routine engineering, not megaprojects, at this stage.
Further, I suspect the human brain is less sensitive than software to minor details of underlying platform. Probably small changes in the physics model correspond to small changes in temperature, chemical content, etc. And an emulation that’s as good as a slightly feverish and drunk person would still be impressive and even useful.
″ Apple has now done it twice,”
No they didn’t. At least one of those times was actually the software I described above, bought from the company I worked for. So I know exactly how hard it was to create.
“Things like the JVM or the Microsoft common language runtime are basically emulators for an abstract virtual machine”—which the engineers themselves get to specify, design and implement,
“Further, I suspect the human brain is less sensitive than software to minor details of underlying platform. ” I would love to live in a world where re-implementing an algorithm that runs on meat, so it runs on silicon instead, amounted to a ‘minor detail of underlying platform’. I live i this one, however.
I had assumed we were talking about low-level emulation: the program explicitly models each neuron, and probably at a lower level than that. And physical simulation is a well understood problem and my impression is that the chemists are pretty good at it.
Trying to do some clever white-box reimplementation of the algorithm I agree is probably intractable or worse. The emulation will be very far from the optimal implementation of the mind-program in question.