I have often wondered how a hypothetical alien would perceive our computer systems... It's wonderful to see someone has thought about it too (and they made it fun to read about!)
At the very least, they might be fantastic at pair programming! Or even programming multi-core, being dual-core themselves might provide insights impossible for normal people.
It also seems sad that this might be the closest thing we ever get to a truly alien intelligence (depending on how tightly coupled they are). Imagine a creature that not only can't conceive of living a life uncoupled from its binary partner but may be horrified by the thought. And what will we do with this fantastic intelligence, unique in all the world? Reality TV.
Soviet computers are an interesting historical riff on this.
But I think this would be impossible to cut the cord completely, because a computer is basically a communication system (internally and networked) and by Conway's law groups zero in on comms systems that reflect their own dynamics, so as a civilizations we've built devices and networks that have zeroed in on our own internal dynamics. Therefore as a member of this civilization, you could not create something different. You'd need to go hang with some folks completely different until you absorbed that, then make it to reflect their dynamics. Uncontacted Amazon tribes? Dolphins? Elephants? Plants?
Who knows what sort of tech aliens would have? I don't think this whole foray into general purpose computing was necessarily pre-destined. Maybe their whole system could look more like a bunch of strung-together ASICs. "You made your computers drastically less efficient so that anyone could program them? Why would you want your soldier-forms and worker-forms to program computers? Just have the engineer-forms place the transistors correctly in the first place, duh."
Maybe some avout would develop a discipline where they execute programs in their minds. Some sort of Chinese Room setup but for general purpose computing.
Hey Charlie, I like to think about this sort of stuff but I'm not smart enough to contribute technically. Good luck with it though! One day someone will reinvent computing in an unexpected way and change the world. Maybe you!
That reminds me of a funny presentation which is basically "if we engineered a bunch of exotic sci-fi concepts... what would the perl programs running on them look like?"
More formally: "Temporally Quaquaversal Virtual Nanomachine Programming In Multiple Topologically Connected Quantum-Relativistic Parallel Timespaces... Made Easy!"
I, for one, am ridiculously excited by the idea of an entirely new computing paradigm. I know some at HN abhor anything that isn't practical this very second, but I think they just lack imagination. I'd be interested in any articles submitted in the vein of non-traditional computing.
> I think if you traveled back in time to the Roman Empire and told them how to manufacture this stuff, you could plausibly create a very modest computer.
Then finally there'd be a use for the Pope's tweets in Latin.
https://ngnghm.github.io/index.html
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