X-Message-Number: 5802
Date: 23 Feb 96 06:23:59 EST
From: yvan Bozzonetti <>
Subject: SCI.CRYONICS : sci.life-extension,uk.legal

In message # 5754, Marshall Rice says :

>Let me draw an analogy. Imagine a shelf of books. Imagine that you began 
>tearing out the pages and throwing them on the floor, then tearing the pages 
>nto individual sentences, then the sentences into words and finally the words

>into letters. At the same time, imagine that someone was recombining >fragments
in different order to the original, which you again tore up.
>
>At what point could you say that the information in the books could never be
>recovered? You could not say precisely, but you could be pretty certain that
>that point would be passed, probably by the time the first few pages were
>torn up and certainly by the time a few sentences had been recombined.
>
>Imagine, then, the process taking place simultaneously with all of the books 
>in a library containing more volumes than there are atoms in the solar system 
>(as there are potential neural pathways in the human brain)...... 
>
>Dream on!
>
>- 
>Marshall Rice

Yes, I dream:

Solar system mass is about 2 x 10^27 metric tons = 1.2 x 10^57 atoms, assume we
have to look at each atom and try to put it along each other atom, that would

amount to near 10^114 operations. Something definitively impossible?  then think
about a quantum computer working on 1024 bits long words, it would process near
10^308 operations simultaneously. This is so large a number than you could as

well think of all usual numbers, including brain complexity as nearly nothing. I
have sent some days ago a scientific communication abstract about the possible
technology useful for producing such a computer.

There is a not so dreamed version of a similar story:

Some Death Sea scrolls are reduced to small fragments one word or one letter
long, how to build back them? The answer is to test the genetic markers in the
goat skin on wich they are written. So it is posible to ascribe every fragment
to a given scroll. From what is written a computer can then decipher the full
text. A clear view of the problem can sometime solve "imposible" tasks with
today technology. 

	Y. Bozzonetti.


Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5802