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[miauw62]

I think the DF releases will get longer and longer. Eventually Toady will integrate himself into the source code and will program for eternity. Patch cycles will grow longer than lifetimes. Empires will rise and fall while the entire world waits for a new version.

Tarn Adams = Hari Seldon?

[Graknorke]

If HGTTG is any reference, not particularly powerful.

What makes you say that?

[miauw62]

That'd just be a hollow sphere the size of the earth, I not a solid, earth-sized computer.
Also, the computations were disrupted by the B-ark.

[Sergarr]

If HGTTG is any reference, not particularly powerful.

What makes you say that?

The computation would be inherently limited by the speed of light, I guess. And the parallel calculations can only get you so far before bottlenecks and race conditions will break your will.

[Liber celi]

Plot Twist everybody saw coming: It was Toady who programmed SBURB, as a minor side-project.

[Sergarr]

Plot Twist everybody saw coming: It was Toady who programmed SBURB, as a minor side-project.

And then Karkat was Armok's avatar.

[Bauglir]

What if Toady undergoes transcendence and turn the entire world into the source code for Dwarf Fortress on a cosmic scale?
How powerful would a planet-sized supercomputer be anyways? Assuming that they can handle gravity and nuclear fusion somehow.

Hm... not big enough. We should go bigger. And build it in the sun, so it can simply harvest the ambient energy from all dat fusion. A caltrop shape would probably be a good compromise between surface area for energy harvesting, volume for computation equipment, and minimizing the impact it'd have on the Sun's own structure since we don't want to interrupt its lifecycle and thereby wreck our energy source. Won't get us all the way to Kardashev 2, but a good chunk of the way there.

[Sergarr]

What if Toady undergoes transcendence and turn the entire world into the source code for Dwarf Fortress on a cosmic scale?
How powerful would a planet-sized supercomputer be anyways? Assuming that they can handle gravity and nuclear fusion somehow.

Hm... not big enough. We should go bigger. And build it in the sun, so it can simply harvest the ambient energy from all dat fusion. A caltrop shape would probably be a good compromise between surface area for energy harvesting, volume for computation equipment, and minimizing the impact it'd have on the Sun's own structure since we don't want to interrupt its lifecycle and thereby wreck our energy source. Won't get us all the way to Kardashev 2, but a good chunk of the way there.

Unless you know materials capable of withstanding 150 000 000 Kelvins of temperature, this is impossible.

[Bauglir]

Presumably we're going to be cheesing it. Instead of a system that withstands that temperature, we'll go with one that includes surface reconstruction to repair the inevitable damage as it happens. Since the whole thing will be powered off the ambient heat anyway, that should also be reducing the immediate surface temperature by some amount, and since we're talking about a fusion environment we should have adequate power for producing heavier elements we need out of the local hydrogen and helium. I'm assuming a great deal of nanotech here, anyway, and I'm also blatantly ripping off a quality sci-fi story, whose name I won't reveal on account of I just spoiled everything.

[Graknorke]

What about one that is designed to operate at those temperatures? Not entirely sure how that would work, but it's the optimal solution.

[flabort]

On a related question, is there a material combination that can convert heat into electricity without a turbine?

Such as one metal acts as a heatsink, and another wicks away the heat from the heatsink in the form of electricity. Like how the boron or whatever in solar panels convert light energy directly to electricity.

[miauw62]

What if Toady undergoes transcendence and turn the entire world into the source code for Dwarf Fortress on a cosmic scale?
How powerful would a planet-sized supercomputer be anyways? Assuming that they can handle gravity and nuclear fusion somehow.

Hm... not big enough. We should go bigger. And build it in the sun, so it can simply harvest the ambient energy from all dat fusion. A caltrop shape would probably be a good compromise between surface area for energy harvesting, volume for computation equipment, and minimizing the impact it'd have on the Sun's own structure since we don't want to interrupt its lifecycle and thereby wreck our energy source. Won't get us all the way to Kardashev 2, but a good chunk of the way there.

Unless you know materials capable of withstanding 150 000 000 Kelvins of temperature, this is impossible.

Just build a Dyson Sphere with supercomputers attached to the outside.

[dragnar]

On a related question, is there a material combination that can convert heat into electricity without a turbine?

Such as one metal acts as a heatsink, and another wicks away the heat from the heatsink in the form of electricity. Like how the boron or whatever in solar panels convert light energy directly to electricity.

While I don't know what exactly the materials typically used are, and only vaguely understand the physics behind it, what you're thinking of is a device called a Thermopile. Though it doesn't quite work like you're saying - if you could convert heat directly into usable energy you'd be famous for having reversed entropy! Thermopiles work on heat gradient - They generate electricity using the difference in temperature between their sides.

...How how on earth does this have anything to do with MSPA.

[flabort]

I think it's a derail.
Starting with guessing how long Gigapause will last, comparing it to major DF releases, then someone said Toady programed SBURB as a side project, then someone said that Toady turned the world into code, or a computer or something.
From there, people were conversing how big a computer could get, and then powering a computer by putting it into the sun.
So I asked if there were a way to turn heat into electricity (This would make refrigerators and nuclear reactors far more efficient).

So we need a super thermopile in order to make the computer that can run the first iteration of SBURB ever. Further iterations would of course alter universal laws enough to fit the code onto smaller computers.

[Mageziya]

It's been a while since I've seen a Bay-12 style derail.

I forgot how spectacular they tend to get. Surprised a thread wasn't born out of this discussion like it was for the infamous Mars Colonization derail.