Why is there only one copy of the Doctor?

[DarkOmen]

oh yeah... i forgotted

[Jordanis]

oh yeah... i forgotted

An easy mistake to make, given Voyager.

To use your note analogy, the future computers may hand the note to another computer. That's brilliant. You could cut the transfer time in half. It would also improve security since the original is gone the next time you 'write' something(use that program). It would be near impossible to find a document that's been 'handed' to another computer.

It's already impossible to recover a document that's been physically overwritten on the disk a couple of times. As for 'handing', that would, as I say, require a physical transfer of the physical medium on which the bits/quads are stored. Using a transporter for that would create such an AMAZING increase in the necessary computer resources, since now instead of keeping track of one quad for each quad being transferred, the computer must keep track of enough quads to store the quantum state of every atom in the physical structure for each quad.

And it would still be really slow.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

That's thinking with todays technology. 400 years ago did people imagine things like SONAR, RADAR, thermal imaging, or even computers existing, much less being used on sea-faring vessels. Computer technology is still evolving in ways we can barely imagine before it's created. Just because something is beyond our understanding doesn't mean it doesn't or can't exist.

[Thorin]

There is a backup Doctor - in one of the episodes he is in a museum some 800 years in the future or something. While the real doctor stays with Voyager. It was a strange episode.

[Jordanis]

That's thinking with todays technology. 400 years ago did people imagine things like SONAR, RADAR, thermal imaging, or even computers existing, much less being used on sea-faring vessels. Computer technology is still evolving in ways we can barely imagine before it's created. Just because something is beyond our understanding doesn't mean it doesn't or can't exist.

But I'm speaking in terms of theoretical computer science. What you're saying is like telling a physicist that someday we may wantonly violate the laws of thermodynamics by getting energy from nothing. It goes down to the roots of a computer as a machine that executes an algorithm. It may be what is to us an unimaginably complex algorithm, like Data or the human brain, but it's still an algorithm and that means instructions executed one after the other.

[Thorin]

What you're saying is like telling a physicist that someday we may wantonly violate the laws of thermodynamics by getting energy from nothing.

Holds breath.
Technically...

[Mikey]

Don't. Please?

[Thorin]

Don't. Please?

I'm only kidding.

Though technically...

[Jordanis]

Don't. Please?

I'm only kidding.

Though technically...

I say we blow him out the airlock as a physics experiment.

[Mikey]

Maybe, but let's wait until he provides that info...

[Blackstar the Chakat]

What you're saying is like telling a physicist that someday we may wantonly violate the laws of thermodynamics by getting energy from nothing.

Now you're catching on. What I'm saying isn't as nearly as complex as that but you have the right.

And that episode with the backup module proves that the Doctor is difficult to copy, otherwise they wouldn't have a specific module for backing him up. Did they ever give a stardate for that episode? That would help to know when the ability to replace the Doctor was lost.

[Deepcrush]

There is a backup Doctor - in one of the episodes he is in a museum some 800 years in the future or something. While the real doctor stays with Voyager. It was a strange episode.

I think that was the whole program for the doc. He was forced to load into a tricorder for whatever reason. I don't think they ever said he was the back up doc, it seemed more like a alternate timeline.

[Blackstar the Chakat]

There is a backup Doctor - in one of the episodes he is in a museum some 800 years in the future or something. While the real doctor stays with Voyager. It was a strange episode.

I think that was the whole program for the doc. He was forced to load into a tricorder for whatever reason. I don't think they ever said he was the back up doc, it seemed more like a alternate timeline.

No, he said it was his holographic back-up module.

[Jordanis]

The doctor may be more difficult to RUN than difficult to copy. A 'holographic back-up module' may mean that the module has the specific processor architecture for the sort of massively parallel and whatever operations necessary to create a facsimile of a sentient intelligence.

Maybe the funny thing about the Doctor's program is that it requires a specialized storage array to run from. In terms of the program needing to access and process information, a sentience is significantly different from a plain computer. Perhaps imitating a human brain meant they needed to imitate it in other ways in the hardware--information stored by cycling electronic patterns rather than set bits, for instance.

It doesn't negate the fact that he needs to be copied to be moved, but it does make him need some specialized hardware to run or be backed up. At this point I'm just throwing random ideas, though.

[Deepcrush]

Thats a very good point.