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81 " Life evolved, so far, by making use of the viral cloud as a source of backup copies and a way to rapidly exchange genetic code. Life may be better adapted to the digital universe than we think. "
― George Dyson , Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
82 " The establishment of the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy in 1867 had brought an interlude of peace and prosperity, and a lifting of restrictions against Jews, to a country best known, according to Klári von Neumann, “for the gallantry of its men, the beauty of its women, and last, but not least, for its hopelessly unhappy and unlucky history. "
83 " When we submit a human or any other animal for that matter to an intelligence test, it would be rather unusual to claim that the subject is unintelligent on the grounds that no intelligence is required to do the job any single neuron or synapse in its brain is doing. We are all agreed upon the fact that no intelligence is required in order to die when an individual is unable to survive or in order not to reproduce when an individual is unfit to reproduce. But to hold this as an argument against the existence of an intelligence behind the achievements in biological evolution may prove to be one of the most spectacular examples of the kind of misunderstandings which may arise before two alien forms of intelligence become aware of one another. "
84 " The acceleration from kilocycles to megahertz to gigahertz is advancing even faster than this increase in nominal clock speed indicates, as devices such as dedicated graphic processors enable direct translation between coded sequences and memory structures, without waiting for any central clock to authorize the translation step-by-step. No matter how frequently we reset our own clocks to match the increasing speed of computers we will never be able to keep up. Codes that take advantage of asynchronous processing, in the digital universe, will rapidly move ahead, in ours. "
85 " Billions of dollars were sunk into cables spanning six continents and three oceans, and a web of optical fiber engulfed the world. When the operation peaked in 1991, fiber was being rolled out, globally, at over 5,000 miles per hour, or nine times the speed of sound: Mach 9. "
86 " The survival of the fittest is a slow method for measuring advantages,” Turing argued in 1950. “The experimenter, by the exercise of intelligence, should be able to speed it up. "