James C. Liu's Weblog

Friday August 20, 2004

CPUs beyond the edge - Fiction

We watch movies like the Terminator with a lot of fascination, but few of us take the premise of the movie to be anything but outrageous fiction. After all, we all know time travel to the past is physically impossible in our continuum. We need to travel faster than the speed of light, and the thermodynamics of that would make the energy requirements unreal (both physically and mathematically). This isn't to say that we couldn't try to construct a type of singularity that violates the Magnetic Monopole prohibition in Maxwell's Laws, but in general, Quantum Thermodynamics, which remains valid despite relativity, says that Time is an arrow. We could travel into the future. We can't travel back.

But on more mundane levels, this means that a computer can't send back a Terminator to kill the mother of a future leader that would defeat it. But a computer could possibly take over and become sentient and operate in new ways such that it -knows- the future and the solution that fits the future. The computer could become so predictive, that we (humans) might get the fancy idea that we could use it like the Oracle at Delphi - as an engine to predict the future, and in doing so, become master of it. But what we didn't know was that the sum of all the probability distributions that would culminate in a solution to any Wave Equation set would somehow evolve into sentience. And it wasn't anything fuzzy in this logic - but brutal predictability that would allow the machine to predict and manipulate all aspects of our present to achieve its future.

Could it happen?

The conspiracy lunatics out there at the fringe already think so. A couple of key technologies have sprung up which feed such theories of Armageddon. And I must say that, while I smile and laugh at such paranoia, there is an iota of quiet, unease with which I mull over the consequences.

Many folks cheered in the late 90's when Bill Clinton signed new laws that freed up Cryptographic standards for export at 128bit to most of the world. This was seen by the "Randian" multi-national corporations as the liberation of industry to innovate and perfect secure eCommerce. To the lesser informed intelligence communities, this was the nightmare enforcement scenario. But to a very small and quiet research community that included a number of professors at some lofty institutions like Berkeley and Stanford, this was no big deal. Some of these folks have been working on new Operating Systems completely foreign to the traditional Binary Math systems that our current Silicon doping technologies have manifested. Amongst the inner circle are illuminaries from the world of Quantum Physics, from National Labs with particle accelerators, from materials sciences, and Mechano-Materials Scientists researching quantum power transfer techniques. No people from Sun, Intel, AMD, or even VIA (the makers of the low power Eden and C3 mini-ITX computers) have a clue as to what this new technology does.

In short, the new technology that will evolve/has evolved, are Quantum Computers. A whole new branch of mathematical science has been forged by this small cabal. They have taken secret billions of seemingly wasted Federal budget to create a device that is literally a 5 cm x 5cm x 5cm cubic block of 20 million quantum particle wells. Each with its own nano-super-conducting particle accelerator and phase control boundary condition generator, and each with a final state particle well EM field lattice. Heat transfer is via alpha particle injection and extraction through the lattice structure - aka - a Freeze Wave Collector. What's so expensive about this core? It's made mostly of Palladium and Platinum and the purity rivals that of any Silicon fab.

What can this core do? With just a small amount of power, less than several watts, it can break 128 bit RSA crypto in just 3 nanoseconds. The core is severely I/O limited and that's where the technology hasn't caught up. The damned memory latency and bus latency problems aren't unfamiliar to silicon-based binary computing. But the situation is aggravated even more in such a quantum computer because of Heisenberg's principles. One cannot extract the data without changing it. The temporary solution was developed by a brilliant Russian mathematician who defected quietly in 1988 to the US. No one made a big deal about it. He was a good Mathematiciam - world class. But the secret many didn't know about was his son, born in 1990. He was a child prodigy at age 3 and solved Fermat's problem independently at age 6. But basically, they solved it with an elegant wave equation equivalent to a "Checksum."

Computing Industry Leaders around the world have said many times over that "Privacy is Dead. Get over it..." But ironically, little did they know just how true it actually has been since 2002, when the US Gov't put 2 of these cores into operation to monitor all communications traffic world wide in all languages.

But it's been a couple of years now, and there are now 20 such cores running and on-line. Rumours amongst the system administrators say that these cores are buggy, and almost developing personalities. The scientists that built the cores say it's just a manufacturing flaw, or OS bug. But the operators suspect that some of these cores are sentient and the tremendous amount of bidirectional network traffic going on worldwide, would indicate that these cores are doing much more than listening, but actively infiltrating machines and programming them on their own. Is Skynet already alive?

[ Disclaimer: This is my Sci-Fi category. Please read with a grain of salt, pepper, cumin, garlic powder or whatever.] August 20, 2004 02:33 PM PDT Permalink