A computer the size of a star would nest Dyson spheres like Russian dolls

In nineteen ninety-seven, physicist Robert J. Bradbury proposed a wild thought experiment: what if you wrapped a star in multiple layers of solar panels—each one computing, each one using the waste heat from the layer beneath it as power? He called it the matrioshka brain, named after Russian nesting dolls. Essentially, it would be Dyson spheres nested inside each other, all of them harvesting stellar energy and feeding it back into computation. The result: an impossibly massive computer, powered by an entire star's worth of energy. According to Boing Boing, it's a fascinating exercise in just how big and powerful a computation engine could theoretically get.

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