They don't, see https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07061 . The basic idea is to use "picosecond-level" synchronization to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. They mention that a truly phase-coherent swarm would perform much better but they consider that a longer term prospect (section 2.1.4).
I am quite confident all the current employees of OpenAI qualify as real people. They certainly have problems and probably a good share of those problems are "real" too.
Of course their priorities may be off and they could be open to be persuaded to work in a different direction. But I don't think that condescension would be very effective for that.
That's true, but supersonic planes also travel higher (Concorde -> 18 km, XB-70 -> 22 km). The real problem is that L/D decreases at supersonic speeds. For example, the XB-70 had a L/D of about 7, while the 707 had a L/D over 18...
It's mostly a question of power. The 1987 design for the TAU probe communication system would have handled 20 kb/s from 1000 AU... by using between 100 and 260 watts for the transmitter (and relatively big antennas):
No, the algorithm as described is very different from binary multiplication. It requires a number of stones proportional to the result, while the number of bits required when doing binary multiplication is polylogarithmic.
It's a big difference: 1000 * 1000 would require 1000000 stones if done with the "Ehiopian algorithm", but it can be done with less than 1000 stones by using normal binary multiplication.
Yes, I agree. My point was that you cannot do substantially better than ion engines without having energy gain and, in fact, you are probably going to do much worse due to the weight of the "fusion hardware".
I'm quite optimistic about magnetized inertial fusion. But the idea of doing the job much better than the Z-machine, with something lightweight enough to carry into space and in less than 10 years seems to me... unlikely, to put it mildly.
Well, controlled fusion hasn't reached energy breakeven at all, even taking into account the kinetic energy of the reaction products. But the low thrust of current ion engines is mostly due to power restrictions (https://groups.google.com/group/sci.space.science/msg/0cb332...). If your spaceship has a mass of one ton and you want an acceleration of 1 centigee with an exhaust velocity of 30 km/s, you will need at least:
0.5 * thrust * velocity = 0.5 * (0.1 m/s^2 * 1000 kg) * 30 km/s = 0.5 * 100 N * 3E4 m/s = 150E4 W = 1.5 MW
If fusion doesn't provide a substantial energy gain, it's not worth the effort. Existing ion thrusters are quite efficient (60+%) at translating electrical power to exhaust kinetic energy.