Turing Containers

::: nBlog :::

While elaborating spimes in the IEEE CQR conference a couple of weeks ago, one of the venerable scientists in the audience asked me whether they could be classified as ‘Turing containers’, analogous to famous Turing machines, which laid foundations for modern computing by specifying the simplest components any computer could be built with.

But what would the simplest spime be? If thinking of just digital representations and memory space for any physical object, it is clearly a boolean value, denoting whether an object exists physically or not. When thinking of simplest possible sensors, we can always envision useful applications concerning millions of objects.

This thinking might sound quite philosophical in the era of petabytes of cheap memory and computing capacity available. However, in today’s fast development cycles components are quickly reused and scaled, meaning that sometimes very inefficient designs bloat to massive proportions. As responsible engineers and purveyors of future business platforms, it is actually one of our greatest responsibilities to ensure resource efficiency at all levels. It is the only way to create a truly sustainable business.

And how would the most complex spime collection look like? Well, it would be the full representation of our universe. Virtual reality without the virtual. A thought experiment for now, but how about in a million years?

Now before diving deeper into Kurzweilian singularity, we’ll solve the fully seamless migration of spimes between our global data centers. But keep Turing Spimes in mind.

//Pasi