wired.com — Intel’s fabrication plants can churn out hundreds of thousands of processor chips a day. But what does it take to handcraft a single 8-bit CPU and a computer? Give or take 18 months, about $1,000 and 1,253 pieces of wire.
May 28, 2009 View in Crawl 4
Closed AccountMay 28, 2009
Point taken, I need to refresh my interneticate.
eatasandwichMay 29, 2009
Pffft. I would have attached blue wire #156 to pin #43.......I guess this guy doesn't want to build a spaceship inside a giant bubble so that he can spy on teenage girls and talk to TV obsessed aliens.
wolfkeeperMay 29, 2009
No, because operations can be encoded in multiple bits. 8 bit computers usually use multiple bytes to encode operations (admittedly mostly the other bytes are used for operands, but still).
Closed AccountMay 29, 2009
You have just proven my point.. "that we currently don't know how" to model artificial intelligence, and we are therefore very far from the goal of strong AI. It is not besides the point, it is the point. My point is that we are much further from a Strong AI than most people seem to want to believe, not that it is impossible. My point is that people look at the problem from an engineering perspective, which it won't be until we have at least a theoretical model to attempt to engineer. That is my point.
rif42May 29, 2009
@HerrWolfYou had zeros and ones? When I started programming we did not even have the ones. I programmed an entire database system using only zeros. Sometimes we could not even get the zeros and had to use the letter o.- Adapted from an old Dilbert cartoon.
theptsMay 29, 2009
It brings tears to my eyes when I hear about you guys' revelling in luxuries like sticks and the letter O. I wish my childhood was that simple.
Closed AccountMay 29, 2009
You have a much narrower definition of life than me if the platform for contemporary computing infrastructure is one of the more important aspects of life. Thats all going to change in the next 10, 100, 1000 years. What about happiness, family, love, the Earth, health, disease, war, death, etc? How does a certain method of distributing programs for technological devices that store and process information in silicon mazes compare at all to any of these things? Thousands of years ago an abacus and papyrus served for record keeping, but philosophers weren't bemoaning the emptiness of life without channels for delivery of free alternatives to the monopolistic Tiberius Co. bronze abacuses or expensive and the impossible-to-maintain-without-inventor's-support Antikythera mechanism.There's a difference between something being important to some people / for some businesses purposes and being an important part of life.
bovineblitzMay 29, 2009
But it means it's possible. The brain is just connections, albeit complicated ones. Physical matter can produce consciousness.
Closed AccountMay 31, 2009
Look regardless of where the operands come from any instruction has to be stored in a single register. The thing has to decode the instruction in one cycle and it only reads one register at a time. Like you said, the instruction is 8 bits (probably less) which is 256 different possible instructions which is insanely more than any processor has or will have for a super long time. One bit registers = two instructions possible regardless of how many more registers you use for extra info that's needed.