I Am Now A Cyberman
Cybermen: You will be upgraded.
Cyberman: Upgrading is compulsory.
I am now carrying a full power CPU embedded in my chest. If I could use it directly I would have new powers, but it is dedicated to monitor my heart function. Alas.
The Procedure
My heart has not been beating well. So they had to implant a device that monitors the heart and also can restart the beating if needed. It was not a long operation—about one hour—but took two days recovering in the hospital.
The worst part of the recovery is that it is not restful. And it is boring. I am now home and resting much better.
Am I Turing Universal?
Well, according to Alan Turing, I was universal as soon as I began to use my brain. But can I leverage my new processing power?
The doctors told Kathryn that some ideas from DNA computing went into my ICD device. Of course, I cannot implement any DNA computing algorithms on my device.
I wonder, however, whether I can get useful outputs by varying the input—such as my pulse. Maybe I do not want to experiment on myself there. But it is not too far-fetched to imagine that in the not too distant future many of us could be controlling computations with our heartbeats. Or at least powering them while controlling with brainwaves. Call it “heartbeat computing”—?
Ken has a more immediate concern: could the computing power in the device be used to cheat at chess? Already many chess tournament prohibit electronic physio devices, even watches, because of this potential. A cognitive implant, however, could bend the rules on what it means to be a human player.
Open Problems
I want to thank all who sent some best wishes. I really thank you all for your thoughts.
I must also especially thank my dear wife Dr.Kathryn Farley for her tremendous support. And also thank Ken for helping her make some calls on our behalf. Thank you both.
Hopefully P=NP gets resolved soon.
Best wishes Prof Lipton. …hope your implant has an AI built to improve the health of your heart.
Live long and prosper, Dick!
I got you fam I am in Baltimore as I write. The contributions I made to medicine over the last couple of years are good, don’t listen to the people who are ’empiricall’ and ‘data driven’ because they can’t even beat an effeciently programmed classical supercomputer…
Anyway P is not NP in the purest mathematical sense. But we struggle to prove this sentence because the tools used to express the proofs, namely your undiscipline brains, ink, paper, computer hdds etc.. these are all closeted quantum computers [Especially the paper, trees are sly and they have many more genes than you].
If you play around with all possible linguistic setups, all symbolic confugartions, it becomes pretty obvious the topological relationship between the p=np problem and what’s his face’s incompleteness theorem with a sprinkle of the Church-Turing thesis. Namely, you are stuck in a trilemma: you arrive at a contradiction that p=np within the domain that the operator ‘=’ allows. Or in another sense, that any ‘writing’ of that proof in any information representation would necessitate that you break some lame classical shannon entropy limits, which would imply that the any language you are targeting the proof for would be a quantum computer>turing machine.
Funny thing tho, if you have an oracle that perfectly chooses a classical language for you to attack the problem with you can guarantee that all the steps after that initial choice are classical. [P=NP when she is not mad at you loool]
Hang in there! Perhaps your implant’s AI will improve your own cognitive function.
Be well soon, Dick!