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Hardware Science

Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator 215

Posted by michael from the first-random-tourist-that-they-had-ever-had dept.
eecue writes "Earlier this year I went on vacation to japan. At the end of my trip I was lucky enough to receive a tour of the Earth Simulator, which is the world's fastest super computer. I took pictures and wrote about it."
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Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator More

Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator

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  • Hmm (Score:5, Funny)

    by protest_boy ( 305632 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:24AM (#5359628)
    I wonder if we can slashdot the worlds fastest supercomputer? ;-)

    • Re:Hmm (Score:5, Informative)

      by ender81b ( 520454 ) <wdinger@@@gmail...com> on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:44AM (#5359680) Homepage Journal
      Well that would, of course, depend on how much bandwith is running to said server now wouldn't it? =)

      Found some nice info (good old google) on said Supercomputer though since the sites linked article didn't have much.

      A Time Article on The Earth Simulator [time.com]

      Top 500 page on Earth Simulator [top500.org]

      NEC page on the Earth Simulator [nec.com]

      Google Translated Powerpoint presentation on the Earth Simulator [216.239.39.100]

      A snippet(s) of info:
      "Based on the NEC SX architecture, 640 nodes, each node with 8 vector processors (8 Gflop/s peak per processor), 2 ns cycle time, 16GB shared memory. Total of 5120 total processors, 40 TFlop/s peak, and 10 TB memory. "

      "Earth Simulator's processors are one-chip LSIs fabricated with 0.15 micron CMOS process and copper wiring. Highly optimized software and high-speed networks that pump massive amounts of data through 7.8TB/s bandwidth connecting the 640 processing nodes are key to the amazing efficiency of Earth Simulator."

      • Even though that 7.8TB/s is the bandwidth within the supercomputer, I'd love to see someone just *try* to slashdot that.

      • In 30 years... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by medscaper ( 238068 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @10:50AM (#5360174) Homepage
        ...will we look back at this and scoff? Well, not scoff, just admire wistfully what we thought was amazingly fast?

        Just curious. It seems that NASA computers that launched Apollo were amazing at the time - the cream of the crop - yet we have far surpassed that computing power, speed, storage in even laptops 30 or 40 years later.

        I can't wait to see my grandkids' pc!

        • Re:In 30 years... (Score:5, Funny)

          by cowtamer ( 311087 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @01:16PM (#5360715) Journal
          Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.

          However, due to the processing power required by Windows Authorized Edition (AE), JRE 25.0, and the GPU cycles required to render clippie in holographic hi-res, it will still take about a second between a menu-click and anything useful happening... (RMSLinux, however, will still run on old 486 SX machines...)

          • Re:In 30 years... (Score:5, Funny)

            by ShinmaWa ( 449201 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @05:08PM (#5361786)
            Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.

            Great! Just in time for Duke Nukem Forever!
          • It will incorporate a quantum co-processor

            But everyone is missing the best part of quantum components...

            Go ahead on overclock a quantum chip all you want, it won't REALLY be fried until you check to see if it is fried, ala ``Schrodinger's Cat"....
    • muhahaha ..
      wait, who slashdots themselves ?
      what's a little bandwidth cost in the hopes of looking worldly & possibly attracting the attention of a g33k girl =) mmmmm

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      world's fastest supercomputer or world's fastest public supercomputer? heh. better ask the LLNL/NSA boys about that one...
    • So fast was it going?

      Doing 60 in a school zone?

      We need a new term. "Fast" is a great word to describe a P5 100 vs P5 233 same type of processor and count. "Fast" is meaningless to describe 2048 x P4 2.3G vs 16 x PowerPC4 dual core 1.3G machines.

      Multiple processors DO NOT MAKE any giving thread to run faster. It only makes multiple threads run at the same time.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:3, Funny)

      by bob_jordan ( 39836 )
      I wonder if the simulator was accurate enough for them to know he was coming.

      Bob.

    • Re:Hmm (Score:2)

      by jo42 ( 227475 )
      > I took pictures

      1) Learn to use a digital camera.
      2) by turning off the flash,
      3) and holding it steady.

      As a flocktographer, you create vacuum.

  • Reliability of its predictions (Score:5, Interesting)

    by hak hak ( 640274 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:34AM (#5359649)
    I wonder how far in advance things like, say, the climate can be predicted, even by such a powerful computer. It's almost impossible to predict the weather for even a small area (I live in the Netherlands) for more than the coming few days to a week, because it's so sensitive to small errors. (That doesn't mean I'm not impressed by the thing, of course.)
    • Dutch weather unpredictable? I suppose there is such a huge range; everything from rain to torrential downpour.

    • Re:Reliability of its predictions (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Turbyne ( 563535 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:43AM (#5359672)
      I don't know if climate prediction was its main task, but anyway:
      1. Read up on the Lorenz equations [google.com].
      2. Spend a week or 2 in Boston and see how random weather can really get.
    • Imagine if the weather was able to be predicted even 10 days in advance with near 100% accuracy. An accurate and reliable forcast would GREATLY effect everything from cargo transport, to disaster preparedness, to "will I have to scrape my windshield in the morning." I can't even begin to fathom how much money would be saved. Too much for my puny brain to comprehend.

      • Re:Reliability of its predictions (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        When your super-accurate weather prediction system would predict that next week there would be lots of snow and very difficult traffic, then so many people would decide to go to the mountains and spend next week snowboarding and skiing that this sudden and unpredicted traffic would in turn influence the weather and the prediction :-)
    • Perdicting the weather of a small or large area makes no difference. Weather simulation accuracy improves as the side of the grid you use decreases. It doesn't matter if you're predicting for the entire USA or just one state, if you don't get detailed enough you're off period.

    • The problem is grid size. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by MyNameIsFred ( 543994 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @07:10AM (#5359740)
      I've read in various articles that supercomputer weather prediction systems look at around 200,000 points on the earth surface. With the points being a few km apart. When you think about the size of the earth, this is a very fine grid. However, when you think about a specific person, the spacing is hugh. Hence the problem with weather prediction. A few km can mean the difference between a downpour in a city, or completely missing it.

      • Holes in the grid (Score:5, Insightful)

        by hughk ( 248126 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @08:48AM (#5359873) Journal
        You are quite right and one of the major issues is the holes in the grid, even at 3Km. Satellite based observation dosn't help much as you only 'see' the tops of any clouds and have no way to measure barometric pressure.

        Many ships record information for the meteorlogical services, but the trouble is that only works where there are ships. In some of the meteorologically interesting places such as the poles are often shrouded in clouds and have few weather stations.

        The truth is that many points must be interpolated. Points closest to civilisation are quite good because there are enough measuring stations. This means that short-term weather forecasts are quite good (except in the UK, where they may be right but delayed or advanced by up to a day) but deteriorates over about three days and over a week or so is extremely difficult.

        Forget the calculations, if you don't have data points, you are just speculating.


    • I've read that underwater currents have a huge effect on the earth's weather.
      Anyone know if the Earth Simulator is taking measurements from these currents?

      -metric
    • They say physicists can predict the universe 5 billion years from now better than meteorologists can predict the weather five days from now.

  • How Stupid!!!! (Score:5, Funny)

    by brett720 ( 548849 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:38AM (#5359663)
    If they are going to simulate the earth...then of course as part of the earth, they will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)...which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1) which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(3) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)..etc.etc.etc...and of course that must go on indefinitely! Dont they have better things to spend millions of dollars of processing power on?

    • Re:How Stupid!!!! (Score:5, Funny)

      by Genrou ( 600910 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:55AM (#5359716)
      Not only that - it is completelly unnecessary. We all know that, at the end of processing, result will be 42.
      • blasphemer! have you even read the sacred text which you so blithly profane?

        they already knew the answer before they built the earth. Earth's job was to calculate the question. ofc, since the golgafrinchins (sic?) showed up early in the process, we've completly screwed up the calculation.

      • Re:How Stupid!!!! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by qute ( 78334 )
        No. This is a common mistake. The supercomputer in HHGTTG calculates 42. The earth's job was to find the question. Something along the line of:
        "What do you get if you multiply 9 by 6 and"
        (Then they ran of of scrabble pieces :-)


    • Yeah, but now that they've got the simulator running, there is no need to **actually** **build** the hardware machine. ;)

  • Sounds like they may be overworked.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Molt ( 116343 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:38AM (#5359664)

    The article mentions that "They were afraid to mention on their website that they offered tours as there were only 3 english speaking employees of the lab". Now this hits Slashdot. Guess they may as well mention it on their site now, since it's already now known in the world of the rabid technophile.

  • I just rooted it. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Stonent1 ( 594886 ) <`ten.kralctniop.tnenots' `ta' `tnenots'> on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:39AM (#5359665) Journal
    Now I changed the password to the final 84 digits of pi. See ya suckers!

    • Re:I just rooted it. (Score:3, Interesting)

      by aegilops ( 307943 )
      Hmmm. "Final" digits of pi, eh? Hey, the comment was a reasonably funny idea, and the flamebait mod is a bit harsh, but have a think about it for a second.

      I read in Q Magazine (music mag from the UK) a column by Blur's bassist in which he wrote that he was doing some thinking about the value of pi, which as we know is an infinite decimal. No, not in the style of "one ninth" which is, also, an infinite decimal (0.1111... recurring), but rather, an infinite, random sequence of digits, that occurs in a precise order.

      Now think about that for a second. He pointed out that if you were to take the number 6 and repeat it a million times, and then string together the phone numbers of everyone in your nation's capital city, then that sequence of digits WILL occur somewhere within pi. In fact, it will occur an infinite number of times, but let's not labour the point.

      Taking his original concept, it occurred to me that you could use a system whereby a sender and receiver both have a whizz-bang algorithm for calculating pi. Now, no doubt the maths graduates in Slashdot will chime in with how this can be done, but let's imagine that both you and I have some method of reliably generating a sequence from pi (e.g. start at the millionth digit within pi's sequence, and then crank out the next 100,000 values).

      So imagine, say, if you were to take some digital media, e.g. the entire source code for Windows, and zip it up into a single archive. The sequence of values that represent the archive would also occur somewhere within the sequence of pi. Now assuming (ah! a big ask) I can FIND that sequence somewhere in there (may take a while...) I can effectively represent ANY binary stream by simply knowing where to start within pi's sequence, and for how many digits (known beforehand by having access to the original file). This way, the binary stream can be "stored" simply by reference to its starting digit, and its length.

      This is a pretty mad concept when you think about it. Data transmissions for previously analysed, static data would become immediate (only two numbers to send) although the burden of using this technique naturally falls on the originator host to find the sequence within pi, and for the recipient to have a method of regenerating those digits. Hopefully, it would be easier to regenerate the sequence for the recipient. So a central computer with access to the media and a staggering quantity of poke (hey! The Earth Simulator!) can scan through the sequence of pi to find the starting point, but once that job is done, the recipients may not have to trawl through all of pi in order to regenerate the sequence (assuming you have an algorith that can start at an arbitrary location within the digit sequence ... although this may not turn out to be the case. I don't know what algorithms people use to calculate pi to these levels of accuracy).

      All digital media could be stored by those two values, irrespective of size. No DRM concerns for accessing digital media (hey, it's just two parameters to the pi algorithm, and I'd be fairly confident on the 'prior art' argument against patents prohibiting this if they tried to patent any restrictions). No media degredation in storage (e.g. CD-Rs not being readable after a few years). Who would need terabytes of storage, when a terabyte could be represented by two numbers? Unless, of couse, the starting point itself is so far into the sequence of pi that it takes MORE space to store the starting point than the size of the binary stream itself.

      Anyway this comment is always going to languish in the -1 off-topic silt at the bottom of the Slashdot pond, but this occurred to me not so long ago and so I fancied sharing.

      We apologise for this break in transmission, normal service will now be resumed.

      Aegilops

      • Re:I just rooted it. (Score:3, Informative)

        by QuMa ( 19440 )
        Just because the n-ary representation of pi is infinite does not mean that all sequences will occur in it, and this has in fact not yet been proven.
        • But Pi is irrational, so is not a repeating pattern. Ergo, all possible sequences will occur, since there are an infinite series of digits to Pi, and can't be represented as a finite function. If you think about it, you'll see that it's self-evident.

          • Re:I just rooted it. (Score:3, Informative)

            by QuMa ( 19440 )
            Nonsense. Think of a number that's looks like the binary expansion of Pi (ie just 1's and 0's), but in base 10.This'd be non repeating, irrational, not representable as a finite function (for suitable definitions of 'a finite function), and yet I can assure you you won't find the sequence 123456 in it.
      • The digits of Pi, are, in essense a random stream of numbers. The chance of finding a specific single digit at any part in the stream, assuming a base system of 10, and ignoring all other considerations is 0.1. The chance of finding it after looking twice is 0.1 + (0.1 * 0.9). Three times is 0.1 + (0.1 * 0.9) + (0.1 * 0.9^2).

        Therefore looking for the digit n times is the sum of the series 0.1 * (0.9)^i. Which is a geometric series and equivalent to 0.1(1 - 0.9^n) / (1 - 0.9), which equals (1 - 0.9^n). Thus, the average number of tries to find an single digit is (log 0.5/log 0.9) =~ 6.57881

        What about two digits? A similar solution: (log 0.5/log 0.99) =~ 68.9676. Three digits? 692.801. Four? 6931.13.

        Thus, the amount of data is approximately 70% of the original (a digit with 10 possible solutions found after an average of approximately 7 searches). So this algorithm would compress data down, on average, by 70%. Not bad, but not great either, especially considering the computing power to achieve this. There are much more efficient algorithms around today in terms of computing power vs. compression.
        • Make that: Assuming the digits of Pi are a stream of random numbers.
        • The above argument doesn't appear to make sense now. If you can compact an arbitary sequence of numbers by 70%, then you can keep passing the same data again and again through the system and reduce any string of data to a much smaller length. By information theory, this should be impossible, shouldn't it? Anyone now where I've screwed up?

        • Re:Finding data in Pi (Score:3, Interesting)

          by zCyl ( 14362 )
          If we begin with the assumption that the digits of Pi are completely random, then the following analysis is much simpler and much more correct (or it had better be now that I said it was) than the one presented:

          The probability of finding a particular single digit is 0.1, or of finding a particular sequence of two digits is 0.01 or 0.1^2. The probability of finding a particular sequence of n digits is 0.1^n.

          Therefore, the expectation is that on average you will find a particular sequence of n digits once every 1/(0.1^n) digits, or 10^n digits.

          The question then arises as to the efficiency of indexing this many digits to locate the sequence desired. The amount of storage required for the index is log base 10 (log_10) of the number of digits you need to look. If we assume the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits, then the amount of storage required for the index is:

          log_10 (10^n) = n (log_10 (10)) = n

          Unfortunately, the assumption I slipped in above that the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits only holds 50% of the time. Therefore, in order to have a good chance of finding the sequence, we need to include a longer search space, and thus the index needs to be just slightly more digits in length than the sequence being stored.

          In essence, a very effective data expansion algorithm.

          (Proofreading is left as an exercise for the reader.)
      • </PI-encoded-message-begin>
        <start-digit > 09754198093241062140396080639620967866
        <messag e length > 852
        <subencoding> EBCDIC
        </PI-encoded-message-end>

        (spacin g brought to you by the slashdot linebreaker alogorithm and the number e.)
      • While theoretically correct, your problem is that it's probably going to be REALLY far into Pi before you find the right string.

        Even if you can generate that string instantly, and look it up instantly, you still have to indicate where that position is. I'm not a math major, but TANSTAAFL tells me that it's quite likely that the amount of storage space you would need simply to represent the location in Pi and the offset would end up being larger than the data itself (on average).

        Let's take a stacked example. Say you were looking to convey the data "020873". You need to say "start at location 286178, and then 6 more chars" and (even if you somehow found a way to transmit only as much information as you need, perhaps with some implicit stop char delimiting them) you have now been forced to transmit 7 characters to represent 6.

      • Unless, of couse, the starting point itself is so far into the sequence of pi that it takes MORE space to store the starting point than the size of the binary stream itself

        This is exactly the problem: the number of digits required to state the starting point would be on average of the same length as the string of digit you are interested in.

        I once day-dreamed of the "perfect" compression algorithm, based exactly on the same idea. Downloaded from somewhere the first 50 million digits of PI. And, twenty minutes later, my example program was not compressing anything...
      • This way, the binary stream can be "stored" simply by reference to its starting digit, and its length.

        ahh my boy (or girl) you have grasped one aspect of infinity but not the other.

        Let's even assume that it is indeed possible to find sequences in Pi that will be everything you ever dreamed of.

        Now - you are assuming that your sequence is occuring "early" enough so that your index number will be managable. This may simply not be the case. What if your "starting point," as it turns out, is a number that when represented, actually bigger (make that a LOG BIGGER) than your windows source code? Here what I mean is not that the number is big, but the number is LARGE, as in the storage space which it takes. a trillion is a "big" number but only still takes "128-bits." Now imagine a number that takes a trillion bits / digits / whatever to actually "write out" - and that's what your index will likely look like.

        by the way there is an algorithm where you can calculate the digit(s) of Pi without calculating anything that goes before it. In a black-box version it's "int foo (int index)" where index is the digit you want to calculate, and foo will spit out the index-th digit of Pi without calculating any other digits. I think it may even be linear in respect to index (gasp!).

    • In Soviet Russia, the final 84 digits of Pi use you to root supercomputer.
  • ...would be in Nerdvana. [gpf-comics.com]

    Beware of supermodels, though.

  • Just think! (Score:3, Funny)

    by FyRE666 ( 263011 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @06:52AM (#5359709) Homepage
    So if you are in Japan and you are as nerdy as me, email me and I will give you her contact address.
    For the majority of people here, this would be the first female entry in their email client's contact list!

    Man is she in for a bad time!
    • > ... , this would be the first female entry in their email client's contact list!

      Probably the second -- you forgot Mom's email address ! ;-)
    • NHK just had a documentary about Earth Sim a few days ago, in fact. They showed some results from the computer. One I found especially interesting was a earthquake energy distribution if an earthquake was to occur near atama. Watch some TV and you can save big train-fare bux. =)
  • I understand its called earth simulator because it is used for simulations, but does the name also have something to do with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? That would be a cool thing. (In H2G2, the earth, which is the most powerful computer in the universe, is supposed to be a simulation run by mice with humans as the guinea pigs.)

  • shhhh keep it out of the publ. domain (Score:3, Funny)

    by JOW ( 165099 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @07:05AM (#5359732) Homepage
    Pls. Don't tell anybody that we geeks travel around the world to look at computers,
    If any none nerds find out ! it just confirms the general believe that we are all a group
    Of sad persons with no life
  • most people should start with a visit at the LIFE simulator
  • its totaly worthless due to the fact Microsoft tech support says windblows just isnt compatable... /sigh
  • when they were putting a bypass through. It seems that the Vogons had their orders, and the orders included putting a bypass through right where the Earth Simulator was.

    Rather than fail to complete their orders, they went ahead and demolished the entire thing. This one is a replacement.

    [BTW... in case anyone wondered, the answer is 42].

  • what do they use as the interface ?

    alot of mainframes use a unix box
    IBM has now started selling theirs with a intel linux box as the terminal

    and whats the instauction format for this beast ?

    regards

    John Jones

    • Re:so whats the interface ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mister Transistor ( 259842 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @09:19AM (#5359927) Journal
      As far as the command set goes it's a vector processor. That means it has an instruction set that is completely unlike any standard scalar (Von Neumann) archictecture processor you may be familiar with. The CRAY series of supercomputers were one of the first vector processors around; do a google search for "CRAY Instruction Set Reference Card" and have a look. That will give you some insight on how a vector processor is programmed. Most instructions support 3 operands - 2 source and a destination argument.

  • Flash... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    So, you are a nerd, but you don't have the slightest idea of how light reflects on surfaces like plastic and glass?

    Rule of thumb: if flash light falls at a right angle at a glass surface, it will bounce back and you'll have an _ugly_ _bright_ spot in your picture. Use either a circular polarizer filter, don't use flash at all and use better film.

    About the composition, no, there's not much you can do about that technic-wise. Just look at your pictures and learn from your mistakes for the next time.

    Cheers,

    A. "won't open an account" C.

  • Earth simulation, supercomputers and chaos theory (Score:4, Interesting)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @07:43AM (#5359787) Homepage Journal
    Actually, one of the main motivations for work on building computers in the first half of this century was the promise of weather prediction. Those hopes were shattered by the discovery [imho.com] of chaos theory by Edward Lorenz in 1960. The central point of the theory is that natural systems evolve with time in such a way that even a minute error in measurement at some point in time will make the simulated system diverge rapidly from the real system. You may have heard the catchphrase
    A butterfly's wings in Brazil
    Can trigger a Texan tornado

    This is the fundamental obstacle to simulation of natural phenomena. However, while local parameters remain hard or impossible to predict, global parameters are easier to forecast, and computing power helps. This is where supercomputers come in: for example, they help us study the effect of global warming far out into the future.

    • Mathemeticians have been working on numerical approximations of functions (DiffEq, for example), and have been dealing with trying to reduce the error in approximations for centuries, with all the problems involving the approximation getting worse as you leave the starting point and all that.

      Yet it took until the 1960's for someone to figure out that subtle errors at any point in the use of a model of a complex system can cause problems?

      I've always thought that was strange. . .
  • > She told me that they were afraid to mention on their website that they
    > offered tours as there were only 3 english speaking
    > employees of the lab.

    Just imaging whats going to happen now.
    Thousands of programmers now know that tours
    are avaliable and 1% are going to want tours.

    Looks like they will be hireing an english speeking tour guide.
  • Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator

    At first, I read the title as:

    Nerd 'Vacation to the Earth' Simulator

    when it's actually

    'Nerd Vacation' to the 'Earth Simulator'

    The distinction is important.

    Michael

  • The Earth Simulator (Score:3, Funny)

    by FrostedWheat ( 172733 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @08:50AM (#5359874)
    No-one can be told what the Earth Simulator is. You have to see it for yourself.
  • ...does it have USB? Fucking *useless* if I can't plug my camera in!
  • Those pictures look a lot like my living room floor right now. The pictures don't do it justice though.

    -Lucas

  • Have you noticed something important about the asian approach to computing? We at west, want computers that can benefit us, whereas in asia the applications are more aimed to the world, climate, chaotic relations and not the human body itself.

    One can say "yeah, but those advances in world climate benefit us after all" but, they don't start from the human body dont' they?

    The dream of the new to be constructed CRAY of 1 petaflop designer, is to _simulate_ the human cell, when at the same time japanese _simulate_ the earth.

    a macrocosmos to microcosmos relation here I see young jedi.

  • I need to get outside (Score:4, Funny)

    by Cappy Red ( 576737 ) <(moc.oohay) (ta) (nootekim)> on Saturday February 22, 2003 @11:44AM (#5360356)
    Thus, I'm waiting for the sunshine simulator.

    In the meantime, I wouldn't mind playing Zork on
    that puppy.

    West of House
    You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. Somewhere just over the horizon you can see a Tornado in Texas, and somewhere far behind you a butterfly is flapping its wings in Brazil.

    There is a small mailbox here

    There are seventeen grues in this field alone. You have no chance to survive, make your time.
    >Wonder what happen

    *honk*

  • Earth Sim v8 - Help Needed (Score:5, Funny)

    by scotay ( 195240 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @11:55AM (#5360407)
    An even more powerful earth simulator is about to come online with your help.

    The simulator is a powerful quantum computer within a black sphere composed of a high-tech carbon composite material. The sphere is labeled with a black numeral 8 (the current version) within a pure white circle. Opposite the version designation is the observation view port composed of a material with a high optical clarity.

    A dark blue-black liquid contains the qbits in the form of a "quantum stew." The larger the volumes of stew, the more qbits are available for computation. The quantum stew cannot be observed directly without destroying the results of the calculation.

    Results of calculation can be observed indirectly by the use of a quantum answer actuator (QAA). The QAA is an Icosahedron composed of a superconducting material. The QAA interacts with the quantum stew and reveals the results of the calculation through the view port without the need to directly observe the stew.

    Calculations commence by introducing entropy into the system with several shakes and inverting the Earth Sim v8 to reveal the results. This is where you can help. We have built the sphere, but we need funding to construct huge gripping arm and crane to shake up Earth Sim v8 and turn it over to revel the answer. We are still 2 billion US dollars short of our goal. Without your help, my sources say no and our outlook not so good. But with your help of funding, all signs point to yes. Send money now!

  • Watch out for the Frogstar Fighters! (Score:5, Funny)

    by KFury ( 19522 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @12:18PM (#5360499) Homepage
    eecue: While you were there, did you climb out of any windows, or otherwise leave the building in any way other than you came in?

    You should be aware of the very real possibility that you're in a synthetic universe specifically tailored to you. A universe where you are the most important person.

    After all, you would never, ever have been posted to the front page of slashdot, just so people could see your vacation photos, in the real universe.

  • Goedel alert! (Score:4, Funny)

    by graybeard ( 114823 ) on Saturday February 22, 2003 @12:28PM (#5360528)
    So does this "earth simulator" also simulate itself, simulating itself, simulating itself, ...

    Hope it has a big stack!

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