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by 7thaccount 1685 days ago
In star trek they just tell the computer what they want to do in a very high level way like "computer, can you average the natural disaster data on Proxima 5's moon"? There is no file handles to open a .CSV file and find the right column and so forth.
1 comments
hsn915 1684 days ago
How would you program such a computer and what challenges would the engineers face while working on this system?
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mometsi 1684 days ago
A sophisticated AI-powered UI maps your voice commands to an execution graph composed of assorted php functions, single-purpose node packages, and sandboxed excel worksheet cells. Generations of engineers have devoted themselves to rewriting it all in one of several incompatible versions of hyperrust.
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7thaccount 1684 days ago
Well, this is Star Trek here where they can go faster than the speed of light, go back in time, and completely disassemble a person molecule by molecule and build them back up somewhere else (transporter). So I assume it works in some similarly hyper advanced way that would seem like magic to us.
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hsn915 1683 days ago
That's not the point of the question.

I was just clarifying the GP comment

> I sometimes wonder to myself: what programming challenges would come up in something like the starship Enterprise (any of them) and what new language constructs (if any) would be required to address them?

The point of the question is to imagine that you are part of the team building this system. What sort of programming techniques would you be using? Is it going to be Python? Modern C++? Probably none of these things as they are incredibly inadequate for such a system.

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7thaccount 1683 days ago
Ah, I couldn't quite tell. I've asked myself something similar.

If done today I think it's more than one technology. The missions critical stuff could maybe be Ada? The AI stuff maybe logical programming based like Prolog? I assume there's a big database in there.

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hsn915 1683 days ago
The way things are done today, such a system would implode before it reaches anywhere near a usable state.
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7thaccount 1683 days ago
The federation is post scarcity though. You only work on what you're interested though, so unless the Klingons/Borg/Romulans are threatening an all out war, I bet you could take things slow and make sure it's done right.
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