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 | Rampancy and Exponentiatial Growth | |
| Posted By: Forrest of B.org | Date: 10/25/06 4:15 p.m. |
| In Response To: Re: misunderstandings... :P (thermoplyae) : This is an excellent point. Durandal's growth can't be exponential simply
Unless some of the resources he is appropriating are extra coprocessors. I've always imagined Marathon's computer network as a massively parallel system in every way; banks of processors, memory and storage available for the use of any program in the network that needs them (perhaps with certain programs limiting other programs' access to these resources and so on). As Durandal grows, he would require more processing power and memory to run his more complex program at any decent speed, and possibly more storage to store all the new data he is acquiring. Imagine a program on our normal computers: it's a certain size on disk and needs such-and-such much RAM and processing power to run well. Newer versions usually require more of all of the above. Now imagine it can rewrite and update itself, getting fancier and fancier, requiring more and more resources with every new version of itself. Just as running a very resource-hungry program on your computer will slow down or otherwise interfere with the operation of all other programs running, so too would a self-growing program start to cause those same problems. And as space got more and more tight, the growing program would also start to suffer performance problems. If it could (and was intelligent self-aware of it's nature as a computer program), it would probably try to find access to better hardware so it could keep on improving itself without suffering from all these overhead limitations. That is rampancy. As this relates to exponential growth: I don't think anybody was talking about "space" as in physical size. Rather, it was meant that the program grows in it's system resource usage (memory, processing, storage) in a fashion best approximated by an exponential curve. Roughly every X-period-of-time it requires Y-percent more resources. What X and Y is are a mystery; the point is, rampant growth accelerates over time, somewhat slowly at first and then much faster later, "exploding" instead of just gradually creeping at a linear rate. That current programs seem to run at about the same rate on modern hardware as older programs run on their contemporary hardware is a pattern of exponential growth in our software, as hardware resources (as approximated by Moore's Law) follow an exponential growth pattern (roughly 100% growth every 18 months).
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