ntownsend

(Disclaimer: I'm a former RIM employee.)

Space has expanded during the lifetime of the universe so the objects that emitted light at the edge of the observable universe have moved further away since emitting the light. The estimated distance to the edge of the observable universe is more like 47 billion light-years: http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmology_faq.html#DN

The visible universe, however, is a bit smaller since we can only see as far as the surface of last scattering: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_microwave_background_rad...

However, humans being what they are, it seems impossible to guarantee that lack of desire. This is (kind of) demonstrated by Bernard's discontent and by John the Savage's inability to cope with the society. Both were weak cases. Bernard because he was privileged, and John because he was a total outsider that was not acclimated to the culture.

...it might take a little more than the ten years to come up with any sensible code with hope of growing into an AI though...

Dude, you are all over the map.

... he seems to be using DNA as a measure for the amount of irreducible complexity that needs to go into a system that will end up with the complexity of a human brain.

At best, you could say it's a measure of the amount of irreducible complexity for an encoding of the required proteins. We don't seem to have a measure of the system, by which I mean the thing that models the relationships and interactions of the proteins (and their components) with each other and their environment.

If you look at the indices it will look like you have a bunch of undefined elements in the array, but no memory has actually been consumed for those indices in the array so nothing is wasted.

This begs the question, "Why would you do something that convoluted?" Well, you can ask the same of the XML examples, and the answer probably boils down to requirements (or incompetence?).

If it weren't for the von Neumann architecture the author wouldn't have pretty code to look at. I suppose he could write a post about the arty setting of switches and attachment of patch leads on his personal ENIAC.

It seems to me that the requirements for the existence of code meant to program a computer (and look pretty) are a memory to store the code and an automatic method of retrieving, and carrying out, the instructions in the code. That sounds a lot like the von Neumann architecture.

Also, I don't follow the analogy to pre- and post- relativistic physics. There was a shift in the intuition and the models used, but the object of study didn't change. Physics stayed the same. Electrons didn't change their behavior because we came up with new models for them. Similarly, in computer science, a shift in intuition and models doesn't change the nature of computation. The travelling salesman problem is still NP-complete.