clearing bits far away from computation

[Drashner1]

Sorry, new to the discussion groups, I didn't notice for awhile that the 11th post and onwards are on separate pages.

No worries

For virtual life where the internal computation is the entire universe, time to interact with the outside universe is a minor consideration. Small data could be beamed to the core and back by light, but yes large data would have to wait for rocks to be moved. I don't know if there are limits on how efficiently energy can be transferred from incoming rocks to outgoing rocks. I doubt that cold temperatures imply slow computations ... cold only implies low entropy. Defense against the outside universe would have to be addressed.

True - if your computroniun is running a totally self-contained and solipist virtuality, I suppose that it wouldn't care about I/O latency. Although, I will point out that you hadn't indicated that this is what you were going for until this point

I/O latency would be an issue re 'defense', including protecting against natural phenomena. Perhaps it would be better all around to use optical data links, which can transmit a lot of data for a relatively small amount of energy and heat? Although, I suppose if low temps are the main goal whoever's doing this wouldn't go for that.

Reversible computation is always going to be slower than irreversible, all else being equal, because in order to maintain those low temps it has to run all the computations in reverse, thereby taking twice as long as a system that isn't doing that. This probably isn't a major issue in many cases, simply because the computation rate is so high that there really isn't any inconvenience from an end-user perspective or where other factors (such as wanting to pack a LOT of processors in a small volume) outweigh the raw speed issue.

At the moment I'm stuck on the problem of packing a lot of matter into a small space, all at zero gravity. A tube shape has a major radius (central circle to the center axis) and minor radius (central circle to outside surface of the tube). A rotating tube could have centrifugal force mostly cancel gravity of the tube as a whole, but there's still gravity pointed down the minor radius, and variable centrifugal force for the inner and outer portions of the tube. Rotating the surface around the circle as well can cancel the gravity along the minor axis, but ... too many moving parts, I need to do a simulation.

Hm. What are you trying to do this for? How much matter are you going for here and why are you trying to pack it into such a small space (how small of a space).

Bottom lining this: It would probably be much more effective and helpful to provide us with a complete explanation of what it is you're thinking of here from the get go. Based on your posts so far, it sounds like you have an idea or goal at least partially worked out, but it's not clear what it is at this point or where it is to fit into the setting. If you could give us the full picture, we might be able to help you more effectively with it.

Todd