alt Hacker NewsIt's a natural extension of the ideas being discussed - the limit in computation per gram of mass has energetic bounds, as well, with configurations nearing the upper limit that start looking more like nuclear explosions than anything we'd regard as structured computation. The extremes are amazing to consider - things that look and act like stars, but are fantastically precise Turing machines, and so on.
It's a theme that sci-fi authors have explored deeply. Accelerando is a particularly fun and worthwhile read if you haven't already!
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ompogUe • today at 8:01 PM
Computronium! Kurzweil goes into this in the Singularity is Near.
I've always wondered if Warlock from the New Mutants was made of it.
The Bremermann limit is about computational density. It makes sense to talk about computers that are ever more powerful but not necessarily larger.
So we talk about the supercomputers we call cell phones that are orders of magnitude more powerful than the desktop computers I used years ago.
It doesn’t make sense to talk about making super large computers before reaching the density limit, that’s a confusion of concepts.
Making computers faster has involved making them smaller because the speed of signal propagation.