Sign in for recommendations. New member? Start here.

Edge: ENGINEERS DREAMS By George Dyson

leiaxe rated 3 months ago
A hard sci-fi story coming to us from George Dyson. Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures fro...

Like this page from edge.org?

4 Reviews

Characters left: 4000


modernape rated 2 months ago
Is Google about to wake up?
axodys rated 2 months ago
George Dyson's fascinating short story about how artificial intelligence could finally develop.
Daoro rated 2 months ago
Are we searching Google, or is Google searching us?
leiaxe rated 3 months ago
A hard sci-fi story coming to us from George Dyson. Only one third of a search engine is devoted to fulfilling search requests. The other two thirds are divided between crawling (sending a host of single-minded digital organisms out to gather information) and indexing (building data structures from the results). Ed's job was to balance the resulting loads. When Ed examined the traffic, he realized that Google was doing more than mapping the digital universe. Google doesn't merely link or point to data. It moves data around. Data that are associated frequently by search requests are locally replicated--establishing physical proximity, in the real universe, that is manifested computationally as proximity in time. Google was more than a map. Google was becoming something else. ...