Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!ig!agate!pasteur!ames!amdahl!drivax!macleod
From: macleod@drivax.UUCP (MacLeod)
Newsgroups: sci.space
Subject: Nanotechnology and roaches
Message-ID: <3714@drivax.UUCP>
Date: 29 Aug 88 07:06:42 GMT
References: <587138396.iaeh@ISL1.RI.CMU.EDU> <1112@ndsuvax.UUCP> <561@unisv.UUCP> <1988Aug17.170736.2932@utzoo.uucp> <1948@looking.UUCP> <572@unisv.UUCP>
Reply-To: macleod@drivax.UUCP (MacLeod)
Organization: Digital Research, Monterey, CA
Lines: 28

In article <572@unisv.UUCP> vanpelt@unisv.UUCP (Mike Van Pelt) writes:

:...The more you look at it, the problem of making a
:machine that can do even what a cockroach does is not as easy as
:it may appear at first glance.  (Which is one of the brick walls
:I think the nanotechnology folks are going to run into.)

This may just be a loose analogy, but I have to add that cockroaches are
generalized creatures; even if the reductionists were correct, a description
of their state machinery would probably come out to some nearly-infinite
model that approached a complete mapping of all chemical reactions.

The kinds of machines proposed by Drexler, as I read _Engines of Creation_,
are >specialized< devices that are produced to address specific problems, 
like the machine that goes into cut out the Tay-Sachs gene in the ovaries.
Later there will be a *more* generalized  "doctrobe" that repairs a host
of problems, but the problem is one of linear extensions to a program, not
generalizing the behavior of something high up on the evolutionary scale.

If problems in nanotechnology arise anywhere, I suspect it will be in 
implementation of ironclad error-correction algorithms.  I have not 
kept up with developments in either subbranch of CS theory, but I 
believe that Error Correction is doing far better than Artificial 
Intelligence. 

Michael Sloan MacLeod   (amdahl!drivax!macleod)