Computronium

[Ender]

I've come acros this idea a few times in reading Sci-fi, but attempts to research it have been useless. Internet trawls return crap like Orion's Arm rather then actual information. I've seen a few vague statements about "thinking matter" but nothing concrete about how it shoudl work. No papers, no speeches, no books, nothing. I find this most odd, most ideas like this are well established in such media - nanotech being a prime example, but O'Neill's space stations or Clarke's sattilites are also good examples. You can find their roots in a few papers, the idea tossed out in speeches, and then fleshed out in books even if we are nowhere near developing them.

Yet on this I find nothing. So can anyone explain to me how it is supposed to work? Are calculations performed by varying the state of the electrons in that atoms? Or is it another method? How are inputs recieved? How are signals relayed? What about the power source? It would seem to me that any of these would make the comuptation go to crap on that level. How is is supposed to work? What are the sources?

[Ariphaos]

Far as I know, it's supposed to refer to any computing substrate. So aluminum on silicon -> silver on diamond -> something we haven't figured out yet.

Orion's Arm is apparently not the only or first setting to use the term but it has certainly ruined it for me.

[Duckie]

Computronium, I'm given to understand, is just a theoretical term for the most efficient material for computing. It's not actually described as a substance we know about yet or can manufacture.

[Kanastrous]

It's like that unobtanium shit we use when we need warp drives or ultra-impervious armor or room-temperature superconductors.

Or anti-gravity metal.

That last one's a joke.

You'll get it some time around the end of 2009.

[Eris]

I'm actually not sure if there's a hard and fast rule for what computronium is. As referenced before, I usually see it used to describe some hypothetical very efficient and powerful computing material, oftentimes sapient in its own right.

Furthermore, the term offends my sensibilities, as it abuses standard standard naming rules in chemistry. An 'onium' implies that the material in question is a hydride cation. (e.g. H3O+, hydronium, NH4+, ammonium, etc.) Or at the very least an element, a la zirconium, niobium, or strontium. Neither of these, I'm lead to believe, would make for good computing materials. Doesn't make too much of a difference, but still it irks me.

[Starglider]

I'm actually not sure if there's a hard and fast rule for what computronium is.

There are two definitions, relatively and absolute. The relative definition is 'the most efficient computing substrate you know how to make'. The absolute definition is 'the most efficient computing substrate physically possible'. I've seen both used in written sci-fi. 'Efficient' can mean ops/sec/gram or ops/second/watt, depending on whether the typical applications are power or mass limited.

As referenced before, I usually see it used to describe some hypothetical very efficient and powerful computing material, oftentimes sapient in its own right.

'Sapient in its own right' is nonsensical bullshit for basic Turing-complete substrates.

Furthermore, the term offends my sensibilities, as it abuses standard standard naming rules in chemistry. An 'onium' implies that the material in question is a hydride cation.

The term is probably based off 'neutronium', another rather dubious (but much older) term that's much more popular in sci-fi than real science.

[Winston Blake]

Furthermore, the term offends my sensibilities, as it abuses standard standard naming rules in chemistry. An 'onium' implies that the material in question is a hydride cation.

The term is probably based off 'neutronium', another rather dubious (but much older) term that's much more popular in sci-fi than real science.

-onium is also used in particle physics for an exotic atom where the 'nucleus' is a positive particle, like positronium and muonium. Probably by extension from positronium, it also gets used for bound particle-antiparticle pairs, leading to surreal stuff like meson types that are called 'charmonium' and 'bottomonium'.

It's broad enough that I can probably call the unreadably crushed contents of my wallet 'receiptonium'.

[Gigaliel]

The term is probably based off 'neutronium', another rather dubious (but much older) term that's much more popular in sci-fi than real science.

There was also an old Golden Age sci-fi trend to have fictional elements. I always thought it just meant 'material that is capable of performing computations', which always seemed to fit its use in fiction.

Although, I suppose since it would probably be composed of multiple elements it would be more properly computerite since it fits the definition of mineral a bit more than an element. Also -ite is a far better suffix.

[Junghalli]

I believe it simply refers to any computing substrate that's dense enough that on the macroscopic level it would look like one continuous substance, the way the human brain does. Basically, if you take a look at the hard drive of a computer and it's one big block or a couple of solid slabs of something instead of a lot of chips that's computronium. At least that's how OA defined it the last time I checked.

The molecular circuits used in Fourth Imperium computers in the Empire From Ashes series would probably be a good example of computronium. There are probably a lot of other examples in SF that I can't think of offhand.

It's a very broad and totally unscientific term. It's basically just geek slang.

[Eris]

As referenced before, I usually see it used to describe some hypothetical very efficient and powerful computing material, oftentimes sapient in its own right.

'Sapient in its own right' is nonsensical bullshit for basic Turing-complete substrates.

Whether it's true or not that it's nonsense, that's how I usually see it used. An important difference, especially in science fiction.

As an aside, what precisely does being Turing-complete entail? I'm familiar with the basic concept behind the Turing machine thought experiment, but computer science is not my focus, so I never got far beyond that.

Furthermore, the term offends my sensibilities, as it abuses standard standard naming rules in chemistry. An 'onium' implies that the material in question is a hydride cation.

The term is probably based off 'neutronium', another rather dubious (but much older) term that's much more popular in sci-fi than real science.

Actually, neutronium as first conceived does make a fair amount of sense. It's the element with the atomic number 0, preceding hydrogen on the chart. That is, the element consistent wholly of neutrons. Now, this would never stay together outside of some highly exotic circumstances (with the exception of the neutronium-1 isotope), making actual applications of it dubious, but the naming convention is a sound extrapolation.

Even though scientists these days usually talk about degenerate matter rather than neutronium, it is not a particular surprise that this particular term was coined by an actual scientist.

[Starglider]

As an aside, what precisely does being Turing-complete entail?

Basically, 'functions as a general purpose digital computer'.

Whether it's true or not that it's nonsense, that's how I usually see it used. An important difference, especially in science fiction.

Really? Where have you seen it claimed that computronium is intrinsically sentient? I've often seen it used as a description for the hardware an AI runs on, but I haven't seen anyone silly enough to claim that high-density computing substrates are automatically sentient without needing any specific software (then again, I /have/ seen several morons claim 'google will spontaneously become sentient when it gets enough knowledge and computing power', so it would not surprise me). In principle you could design a type of computronium with the necessary AI software hardwired into it, but this is a special subset of the general term.

[Stark]

If the material was intrinsically sentient, does that imply that you can have a brick of it on your desk, totally unpowered, and it is somehow sentient? Or that it somehow magically 'evolves' (lolololol) an AI after being activated?

Oh christ, bad AI in fiction have destroyed my brain.

[Starglider]

If the material was intrinsically sentient, does that imply that you can have a brick of it on your desk, totally unpowered, and it is somehow sentient?

Presumably that's roughly equivalent to a human in a coma (assuming it has AI software in it, it's just not active).

Or that it somehow magically 'evolves' (lolololol) an AI after being activated?

That's reasonably plausible, in the sense that you could hard-wire some sort of simulated environment in which sentient AIs tend to involve (think Core Wars on a massive scale). Computronium can be fast enough, and the simulated environments can be tweaked enough, that this can happen reasonably quickly. But it's really no different from having computronium with a normal AI program in ROM, other than the horribly long boot-up times and unpredictability about how it will behave.

[Stark]

A brick containing a deactivated AI is not sentient. The AI isn't even sentient when it isn't running. You really can't call a brick that will build an AI sentient either, until you actually plug it in and it builds the AI.

I believe the silliness here is that the substance is supposed to be intrinsically sentient, not that it's supposed to be able to run an AI. 'Thinking matter' implies that it's mere manufacture is producing a sentient brick of magic. How does Orions Arm handle the organisation of all these bits of intrinsicaly-thinking lumps?

Oh wait, nevermind. Nanotech. *Waves arms furiously*

[Starglider]

A brick containing a deactivated AI is not sentient. The AI isn't even sentient when it isn't running. You really can't call a brick that will build an AI sentient either, until you actually plug it in and it builds the AI.

You're right in the strict sense, but then a human in a deep coma isn't sentient either. It's typically more useful to refer to an object's capacity for sentience, rather than whether it is actually sentient right now, so I don't mind this usage.

'Thinking matter' implies that it's mere manufacture is producing a sentient brick of magic.

Yeah, that's logically equivalent to saying that a beaker full of unconnected human neurons with the same mass as an adult human brain is 'thinking matter' and 'intrinsically sentient', i.e. it's utterly idiotic.

How does Orions Arm handle the organisation of all these bits of intrinsicaly-thinking lumps?

Don't know, don't want to know.

Oh wait, nevermind. Nanotech. *Waves arms furiously*

Nanotech? Wait, what do you mean by 'oragnisation'?

[Stark]

I was wondering how they worked the connection of lots of individual 'thinking bricks/nanomachines/whatever' into their giant computational arrays. I mean, if they're all individually sentient intrinsically, wouldn't that introduce unnecessary overhead? Do they make special 'in charge' bricks that subdue the AIs on the other ones and use their resources? If they use nano-scale elements, exactly what kind of sentience can they have and how are they combined into their (I believe) planetary-scale computational arrays? I guess they manufacture the 'thinking matter' to specifications that render then addressable memory?

Back to the other point, what does 'an object's capacity for sentience' mean? It's ability to run intelligent software, like a brain or a supercomputer?

[Ford Prefect]

When I examine my limited knowledge of science fiction conventions, it seems that 'computronium' tends to be - as has been said - a super computing substrate, often being very dense (but Ender almost certainly knew that). I've no idea where this concept originated (I first saw it on Orion's Arm, but the idea that they come up with it is ... laughable), and it seems like a rarely used concept. In fact, I can only think of two instances of 'computronium' off the top of my head, excepting OA, and neither time was it specifically named.

The first is Revelation Space, by Alastair Reynolds, though that instance was a little ... unconventional in operation. The other features in Zone of the Enders, but Metatron ore such a bizarre substance that it expecting it to actually have a reasonable method of operation is lunacy.

[Starglider]

I was wondering how they worked the connection of lots of individual 'thinking bricks/nanomachines/whatever' into their giant computational arrays.

The hardware side is a relatively straightforward network design challenge. It's nontrivial, but we already do it all the time (though probably on a smaller scale) in the construction of modern supercomputers (which are basically all based on clusters of thousands of processing nodes). Making the computronium itself will be much harder.

I mean, if they're all individually sentient intrinsically, wouldn't that introduce unnecessary overhead?

Yes. It's pointless redundancy.

Do they make special 'in charge' bricks that subdue the AIs on the other ones and use their resources?

However some of the more pathetic proposed AGI architectures just don't scale (and don't even have the basic 'telepathy' lossless-data-exchange advantage that any sane AGI design will have), so if you're lumbered with one of these for some reason you might have to bother with this crap. But still, designing the control/co-ordination mechanism is going to be a lot easier than designing the AI elements.

If they use nano-scale elements, exactly what kind of sentience can they have

That combines two open research quesions, 'how much computing power can be packed into a "nanoscale element", whatever that is' and 'how much computing power is actually required to support each "kind of sentience", whatever those are. If I had to take a guess I'd say the physical limit for supporting humanlike intelligence (at the limits of known physics) is probably something about the size of a cell (e.g. a cube a few microns across). But don't quote me on that.

I've no idea where this concept originated, and it seems like a rarely used concept

It's quite widely used on transhumanist forums.

P.S. Still waiting for that werechicken character.


and how are they combined into their (I believe) planetary-scale computational arrays? I guess they manufacture the 'thinking matter' to specifications that render then addressable memory?

Back to the other point, what does 'an object's capacity for sentience' mean? It's ability to run intelligent software, like a brain or a supercomputer?[/quote]

[Ender]

Steering this back on target...

I know from wikipedia that "computronium" is a sufficiently vague term that envelopes everything from the processor in my phone to the Inhibator trap in Revelation Space. But I was thinking more along the line of the proposed atomic level processing, instead of the microscale processors currently used or the nanotech rod logic. How does one have atomic levle computation, how does one power it, how do you relay signals, etc? I would think that the signal moving through the material would disrupt the calculation, but I don't know.