lcc.oleg@seas.ucla.edu (Oleg Kiselev) (06/22/89)
vorth%sybil@gatech.edu (Scott Vorthmann) writes: > You can keep a perfect copy (easily?), but you cannot > easily keep the information needed to produce it. Many (or most) objects > _are their own most compact representation_. Take a statue by Michelangelo, > for example. The atoms in the marble are in no particular pattern; how could > you hope to represent their relative positions more succinctly than they > themselves represent this information? Even with a molecular representation, > possibly compressed much as video images are compressed today, the "program" > to produce the statue should be at least 10 times as massive as the statue > itself! That is not a very good analogy. A statue can be reduced to a set of surface points which can be interpolated into a complete and perfect copy. If some sort of numerical analysis methods are used, the number of points will be many magnitudes smaller than the number of molecules on the original statue's surface. The next issue to consider is how precise does the copy need to be. If the micro-scale authenticity is sufficient, there is no need to "remember" every irregilrity of the surface and color on the pico or nano scales. The finer detailes can be filled in out of a library of "generic" information about the material, a sort of "fractal mass" generation. So the *sufficient* information will be considerably (many, many orders of magnitude) smaller and more portable than the object itself. In fact, a *functional* spec with implementation specifications will probably be enough if a sufficiently advanced AI is brain-powering the nano-assemblers.