The computers of Star Trek

[knightgrace]

I was recently rereading the first chapters in this book.

ENIAC had 18,000 vacuum tubes. Eighteen thousand! But contained in this is a different way of looking at ENIAC.

AS 18,000 switches, or 18,000 bits of data.

Using Steve Long's Space Dock Original Series Sourcebook game supplement a Constitution class starship main computer cores, each contains 8,500 kiloquads of data. Or to put it another way, 900,000+ Duotronic relays. Actually 901,000, to divide evenly - 106 switches per quad.

A relay, however doesn't need to be a simple on/off...

It can be multifunction.

But! Converting back, this means that the Enterprise computer core would be 106 times as powerful as a an IBM 360.
So, there you have it.

Exactly how much computer power was figured for Star Trek.

Keeping in mind that a relay isn't a simple switch. This non simple device explains a great deal.

By the way, relay logic is usually implemented as ladder logic.

 

[F. King Daniel]

And Data is as smart as 2 top of the line Nvidia GPU's, or something. Back when we started watching Trek as kids, touchscreens were the future. But they were 30 years in the future not 300. I suspect the rig running the on-set graphics in modern Trek is more powerful than how they imagined future computers in TOS.

 

[knightgrace]

In Omni magazine, back in the the early 1990s, ran an article on the upcoming Star Trek: Voyager series, and the article said that one of the creators of Voyager knew that the computer concepts being designed was only fifteen years at most...

In other words, Voyager was under powered, computer wise.

Which brings up the question of just how A. I. Voyager actually would be.

Hint: Ship in the Bottle, but with far more EHs.

 

[David cgc]

And Data is as smart as 2 top of the line Nvidia GPU's, or something. Back when we started watching Trek as kids, touchscreens were the future. But they were 30 years in the future not 300. I suspect the rig running the on-set graphics in modern Trek is more powerful than how they imagined future computers in TOS.

One thing I like to point out is that all the TOS behind-the-scenes material referred to Spock's station not as "science" by as the Library Computer station. It was implicitly the only place on the bridge that could actually pull information out of the ship's mainframe.

It's a small wonder they started referring to all their computer speeds and feeds as being measured in "quads." Using a real-world figure like operations-per-second for Data was a surprisingly late flub (though, if you wanted to fanwank it, you could say an "operation" in 24th century computer science isn't the same as what it is today). I'm also reminded of the first episode of the BSG prequel "Caprica," which initially referenced the amount of data needed to make a convincing digital avatar of a person being in the hundreds of megabytes, which was changed to be on the order of terabytes for the final aired version, based on a contemporary estimate of the size of the human brain translated into bits and bytes. I'm not sure that was actually necessary, IIRC the conversation was talking about how much personal data needed to be harvested from the internet to acceptably (by some standard) emulate a person's personality, not the actual personality itself, and a few hundred megabytes of text might not be off-base to build a personality profile.

 

[knightgrace]

Three hundred megabytes. Yes, I was initially startled by this figure.


Consider for production system, original called an expert system, needs eight hundred if then else rules to be moderately competent...

So, three hundred megabytes isn't too far fetched, for completeness. Not including image data.

What Zoe Graystone did, is vastly out perform her father, which was the point. He couldn't figure it out, she did.

And I haven't even gotten into fuzzy logic yet, which basically multiplies each if then else statement by a factor of ten. (This changes over time if the fuzzy logic weights can change).

What is implied by the quad, which is beyond binary, is that Metadata is, while connected to the data, is processed separately from the straight line data.

In Caprica, the competition against Grayson Industries developed the metacognitive processor. This is obviously a place holder term, in terms of the real world. A metacognitive processor is the stand in for Graphic Processing Unit. Why? Because it is specialized processor for graphics applications, which in our real world turns out to exactly what A. I. needed. A. I. as a graph...