Last year, Khanna’s construction of a small supercomputer using eight Sony-donated Playstation 3 gaming consoles made headlines nationwide in the scientific community. On the consoles, he is solving complex equations designed to predict the properties of gravitational waves generated by the black holes located at the center of the galaxies. “Science budgets have been significantly [...]
We stand on the threshold of the most profound and transformative event in the history of humanity, the “Singularity.” What is the Singularity? From my perspective, the Singularity is a future period during which the pace of technological change will be so fast and far-reaching that human existence on this planet will be irreversibly altered. [...]
One day, a machine will outsmart its maker. In one of William Gibson’s early mind-bending stories, the protagonist suddenly needs to fly a jump jet. In the cockpit, he finds his employer has thoughtfully stashed a biochip containing all the necessary piloting skills for him to plug into his own nervous system. While your correspondent [...]
Stanford University computer science professor John McCarthy coined the phrase in 1956 to mean “the science and engineering of making intelligent machines,” In the early years of the artificial intelligence movement, enthusiasm ran high and artificial intelligence pioneers made some bold predictions. In 1965, artificial intelligence innovator Herbert Simon said that “machines will be capable, [...]
Udi Manber sums up Google’s core challenge with this description of people’s expectations: “Here’s what I say, now give me what I need.” In other words, the company must use computers to comprehend humans, said Manber, the vice president of engineering in charge of Google search, in a speech at the Gilbane Conference here Wednesday. [...]
A new paper from a group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, “The Potential of the Cell Processor Scientific Computing,” explores the performance of IBM’s Cell processor on some specific types of code commonly found in high-performance computing (HPC) applications. The programs used in the study are essentially smallish code blocks called kernels (see this older [...]
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a topic that always seems to drop on and off the radar of public interest in synch with Hollywood portrayals and celebrity prognostications. Indeed, the most recent spat of attention has followed a much-publicized $10,000 wager made by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil against corporate trailblazer Mitchell Kapor. The bet, solemnized [...]
