Computers Win Another One - All your games are belong to us

We've all heard about the computer's victory over humans in the game of chess. Eleven years ago, the reigning chess champion Gary Kasparov lost handily to IBM's Big Blue. But the game of poker has remained in the humans' column, until now. As the author explains in this article, poker is quite a bit more complicated than chess, and the human brain has been better at it than any computer. No more.

A computer system called Polaris outperformed some of the world's top players last weekend at a human-vs.-machine competition in Las Vegas.

The score was computer 3, humans 2, with one draw.

Bowling's team launched Polaris five years ago as a project in artificial intelligence. At first it did well against amateur players but couldn't beat professionals. Last year, it narrowly lost a match against two poker pros in Vancouver, British Columbia.

This year, a stronger version of Polaris — one that learns how to adapt to an opponent's strategy in midgame — triumphed over seven top-ranked humans drawn from the online poker-training site www.stoxpoker.com.

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Memory Miniaturization - 256G Flash!

How easily we slip into taking profundities for granted. Looking into the purchase of a 4G micro secure digital (SD) drive for my smart phone. Ho hum, right?

Hold up, though. Let me think for a nano-second about this. My first computer entered my life not that long ago (1993). If I try really hard, I might be able to recall its specs. The hard drive was, I believe, 20Mb in size. Only 15 years later, I can buy a drive with 200-times the capacity and is only as big as my thumbnail.

Now here's some interesting news: "CNET site ZDNet Korea reports that Samsung announced the development of a 2.5-inch, 256GB solid state drive (SSD) at the fifth annual Samsung Mobile Solution Forum in Taipei, Taiwan."

Can you not read the writing on the solid-state wall? Technological advance is accelerating!

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Quantum Computing - A Prototype is Demonstrated

As a means (there are more than one being developed) of forcing the death of Moore's law into the very distant future, you cannot hope to beat quantum computing. Whereas conventional computing can, at best, make use of individual atoms to store bits of information (sort of like one man one vote), quantum computing makes use of the weirder features of quantum mechanics that hold sway at very small dimensions to allow unheard of processing power.

In traditional computing, binary code forms the most basic language, with an alphabet of only two letters: one and zero. Each unit of information, or bit, can register either of those two values. In quantum computing, however, the basic unit is called a "qubit," and can register simultaneous values of one and zero, making use of the phenomenon known as "superposition."

In the words of Seth Lloyd, writing for Technology Review:

Since one qubit can simultaneously represent two different values, two qubits can simultaneously represent four (00, 01, 10, and 11, in binary notation); four qubits can represent 16 values; eight qubits 256 values; and so on. Even a relatively small quantum computer, one that had a few tens of thousands of qubits, could consider so many different values at once that it would be able to break all known codes commonly used for secure Internet communication. Quantum computers might also be used for faster database searches, or to tackle hard problems that classical computers couldn't solve with all the time in the universe.

Now comes news that a Canadian company called D-Wave has built and tested a prototype of an "adiabatic quantum computer." The catch? The developers must prove that the computer is actually using adiabatic quantum computing. Turns out this is not an easy task. So stay tuned.

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Busting Through Moore's Law - Nanophotonics is Here!

This is a sharp stick in the eye for all the technological sticks-in-the-mud who prophesy an end to Moore's law.

FRANKFURT - IBM says it has made a breakthrough in converting electrical signals into light pulses that brings closer the day when supercomputing, which now requires huge machines, will be done on a single chip.

Picture it...today's supercomputer will be tomorrow's single chip. A computer that now requires enough power to run hundreds of homes will soon draw only enough to light up a single bulb.

Using light instead of wires to send information between the cores by using a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator can be as much as 100 times faster and use 10 times less power than wires, IBM says.

The new modulator IBM has developed is 100 to 1,000 times smaller than previously demonstrated comparable modulators, IBM said on Thursday, paving the way for significant reductions in cost, energy and heat while increasing bandwidth.

Things just keep getting more and more exciting, yes?

Original article.

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It is Time for a Real PDA

Picture this: Your meeting with the team is over, you say your goodbyes and walk down the hall to your office. Sitting in a tray near your desk are the pages of a transcript of the meeting, which ended only a few minutes ago. You call up the project that was the subject of the meeting on your screen, and you see that every assignment is already listed, every appointment is already scheduled. You thank your PDA, and she replies, "Any time, Barry."

This scenario, which has been portrayed in many a science fiction novel, may become the real deal not too many years from now. An artificial general intelligence who lives in your corporate network, organizes your work life without being asked, and converses with you in natural human language. If truth be told, you've often fantasized about asking her out for a drink.

Enter CALO, "a massive, four-year-old artificial-intelligence project to help computers understand the intentions of their human users."

Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and coordinated by SRI International, based in Menlo Park, CA, the project brings together researchers from 25 universities and corporations, in many areas of artificial intelligence, including machine learning, natural-language processing, and Semantic Web technologies. Each group works on pieces of CALO, which stands for "cognitive assistant that learns and organizes."

Adam Cheyer, program director of the artificial-intelligence center at SRI, explains that CALO tries to assist users in three ways: by helping them manage information about key people and projects, by understanding and organizing information from meetings, and by learning and automating routine tasks. For example, CALO can learn about the people and projects that are important to a user's work life by paying attention to e-mail patterns. It can then categorize and prioritize information for the user, based on the source of the information and the projects to which it is connected. The system can also apply this type of understanding to meetings, using its speech-recognition system to make a transcription of what's said there, and its understanding of the user's projects and contacts to process the transcription intelligently into to-do lists and appointments. Finally, a user can teach CALO routine tasks such as purchasing books online and searching for bed-and-breakfasts that meet specific criteria. CALO can interact with other people, taking on tasks such as scheduling meetings, coordinating among people's schedules, and making decisions, such as deciding to reschedule a meeting if a key member becomes unable to attend.

Look for the progeny of CALO to appear first in large corporations, filter down to medium-sized businesses, and eventually arrive in your own home network. I can't wait.

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Your Brain is a Machine - Get Used to It

There are many whose penchant it is to romanticize the human condition. It somehow makes them feel better about their lives to do so. One of the outgrowths of this habit of spiritualizing material things is the expressed certainty that machines can never become conscious. After all, they think, if machines can ever be made to experience consciousness, then it is very likely that we are no more than machines: There is no soul, no heaven, no spirit, no existence after death. For many people, this possibility is not to be countenanced.

However, more and more researchers are concluding that even our experience of conscious will is an illusion arising from our neurological programming. In a new book authored by Harvard professor Daniel Wegner titled The Illusion of Conscious Will, professor Wegner argues that:

“When you drive to work, you don’t feel there are hundreds of little gears in a machine in your head that make you do this. You think, ‘I’m going to get up and go to work,’ ” Wegner said in an interview

“We think the intentions cause the actions, and we get the feeling we have willed what we do. It could be the intentions and actions are being caused by the machinery of the brain.”

I have written previously about the startling finding that our actions in fact come before our conscious intentions, that our minds are inventing reasons for actions over which we have no conscious control. If, as writes Dr. Wegner, our brains are trying to convince us that we are choosing actions that are merely the result of our neurological machinery, then it is only a matter of time before machines become conscious. According to some, that time may even have already arrived.

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Your Kids Could Soon Have a Virtual Teacher

My wife teaches 8th-grade algebra. She is very good at her job. She should be paid more than she is, but that is a complaint that often falls on deaf politician's ears. In any case, the time may soon come when at least certain parts of her curriculum are taught by a virtual teacher called Eve.

Eve is what's know in in the field of information systems an intelligent or affective tutoring system. It can "adapt its response to the emotional state" of its students (Blogging the Singularity).

The ability of virtual Eve to alter her presentation according to the reaction of the child facing her at the keyboard has been hailed as an exciting development in the $25 billion e-learning market.

The Massey scientists, led by Dr Hossein Sarrafzadeh at the Auckland-based Institute of Information and Mathematical Sciences, tell the story of creating Eve and the teaching system in the latest issue of the leading international journal on information sciences, Elsevier.

Because one-to-one teaching is known to be the most effective teaching method, Dr Sarrafzadeh says the researchers wanted to create a virtual teacher that could pick up body language and facial expressions – like a real teacher – to interact and to ensure they are holding the attention of students.

He says the realisation that software systems would significantly improve performance if they could adapt to the emotions of the user has spawned research and development in the field of affective or intelligent tutoring systems.

“With rising demand for long-distance learning and online tutoring, a computer programe capable of detecting human emotions may become a critical teaching tool.”

Although Eve was developed for one-to-one maths teaching with eight-year-olds, she is a significant new character in the future of human computer interaction and could be a personalized virtual tutor by any name.

Linked to a child via computer, the animated character or virtual tutor can tell if the child is frustrated, angry or confused by the on-screen teaching session and can adapt the tutoring session appropriately.

If you plan to go into teaching, it's unlikely that Eve will completely replace all teaching kind, but there can be no doubt that there will be significant and far-reaching implications. Maybe you should think about teaching computer engineering.

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Predicting the Path to AI

As they say, hindsight has perfect vision. It is a simple matter to look back after an event takes place and recreate the path of steps that led up to that event. It is much more difficult to see that path in advance. When AI is born, assuming that such an event would be immediately apparent, and assuming that it has not yet occurred, what path will it have taken? Will cloud computing and data centers turn out to have been a crucial fork in the road?

IBM and Google have announced a joint initiative to build large data centers that will allow students and researchers to participate in remote "cloud computing," at term that refers to the combined use of thousands of processors, vast libraries of data, and specialized software that "scour the Web and other data sources in seconds or minutes for patterns and insights."

As these cloud computing centers are created and more and more resources are injected into their ever-increasing capacities, will a crucial threshold be attained? It has been theorized that consciousness is an inevitable outcome when a sufficient degree of processing complexity is reached. Are we on a path to the inevitable emergence of a conscious Internet? If this is indeed what happens, remember where you heard it first. Stay tuned.

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DOD Creates Sentient World Simulation

The Register is reporting that the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in building a digital world with billions of nodes representing every human being on the planet.

Called the Sentient World Simulation (SWS), it will be a "synthetic mirror of the real world with automated continuous calibration with respect to current real-world information", according to a concept paper for the project.

"SWS provides an environment for testing Psychological Operations (PSYOP)," the paper reads, so that military leaders can "develop and test multiple courses of action to anticipate and shape behaviors of adversaries, neutrals, and partners".

SWS also replicates financial institutions, utilities, media outlets, and street corner shops. By applying theories of economics and human psychology, its developers believe they can predict how individuals and mobs will respond to various stressors.

This news brings to mind the intriguing question: Are we already living in a simulation? The thinking behind this admittedly far-fetched idea comes from just this scenario, whereby sentient races will find benefit in research projects that simulate different types of worlds.

Alok Chaturvedi wants SWS to match every person on the planet, one-to-one.

Right now, the 62 simulated nations in SEAS depict humans as composites, at a 100-to-1 ratio.

One organisation has achieved a one-to-one level of granularity for its simulations, according to Chaturvedi: the US Army, which is using SEAS to identify potential recruits.

Chaturvedi insists his goal for SWS is to have a depersonalised likeness for each individual, rather than an immediately identifiable duplicate. If your town census records your birthdate, job title, and whether you own a dog, SWS will generate what Chaturvedi calls a "like someone" with the same stats, but not the same name.

Of course, government agencies and corporations can add to SWS whatever personally-identifiable information they choose from their own databases, and for their own purposes.

And with consumers already giving up their personal information regularly to websites such as MySpace and Twitter, it is not a stretch to imagine SWS doing the same thing.

"There may be hooks through which individuals may voluntarily contribute information to SWS," Chaturvedi said.

SEAS bases its AI "thinking" on the theories of cognitive psychologists and the work of Princeton University professor Daniel Kahneman, one of the fathers of behavioural economics.

How long can it be before PCs are powerful enough to allow home users to play around with complex simulations?

Source

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Mouse Brains Examined Online

One of the expectations embedded in the Singularity is the creation of a computer with the power of a human brain, and one necessary (it seems) task to that end is to reverse-engineer the human brain. That means researchers need to be able to examine it in minute detail, at extremely high resolutions. Which is what makes this development such an important step forward.

A multi-institutional consortium including Duke University has created startlingly crisp 3-D microscopic views of tiny mouse brains -- unveiled layer by layer -- by extending the capabilities of conventional magnetic resonance imaging.

"These images can be more than 100,000 times higher resolution than a clinical MRI scan," said G. Allan Johnson, Duke's Charles E. Putman Distinguished Professor of radiology and professor of biomedical engineering and physics. He is first author of a report describing the innovations set for publication in the research journal NeuroImage

The important elements that I see in this report are the increased resolution of the MRI technology and the availability for study of the resulting images.

The consortium has developed the computer infrastructure to collect a rapidly growing library of 3-D mouse brain data, and make all the data available on the web http://tinyurl.com/3cgj6z. The goal is to use mouse brains as surrogates for human brains to study the connections between genes and brain structure. Investigators from all over the world are sending their models to Duke where the 3-D images are acquired in a standardized fashion and made available via high speed web connections.

High resolution magnetic resonance imaging -- which the researchers call "MRI histology" provides distortion-free 3-D images with superb ability to distinguish subtle tissue differences in the brain, according to Johnson.

"The specimen is still actually in the skull," he said. "It hasn't been cut by a knife. It has not been dehydrated and distorted as it would be in conventional histological techniques."

Using computer-guided statistical methods, the data can be segmented into more than 30 anatomical structures with quantitative volume measurements. These structures can then be computer-enhanced to produce color-coded and labeled volume renderings of selected anatomical details in 3-D, seen at any angle.

MRI scanning is also quicker and costs less than conventional histology, he said. MRI histology permits study of an entire brain, which would be prohibitively expensive using conventional methods.

The specific research being done at Duke has to do with understanding the changes in phenotype (physical structure) that are associated with changes in genotype (gene expression). What happens if we don't allow this protein? How will that change the brain's structure? But this technology should also be useful to reverse-engineer the brain in order to simulate it effectively in a computer.

The fact that you have access to these images via the Internet is a major step forward. Not that you or I can learn anything from them, but the right scientists can. That's important. The power of multiple minds at work!

[Source: Eureka Alert]

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Augmented Reality Powered by Vibrations?

Just yesterday an article was posted on NewScientistTech that may well describe how augmented reality may be powered.

A sugar-cube-sized electric generator that feeds on environmental vibrations has been developed. It could power swarms of wireless sensors or even medical implants, researchers claim.

What AR needs are "swarms of wireless sensors" and other devices, scattered throughout the physical environment and creating a seamless mesh of virtual overlays. This can be useful even before we have the contacts that project images directly onto our retinas. Cell phone/PDAs would be able to "see" the overlays, which at first would be primarily informational in content.

Some examples may be helpful. You approach a door in an office building. Standing in front of the door, you hold up your PDA and see the door with an overlay containing information about the business situated behind the door. You can drill down the overlay interface to get the name of the person you are meeting, along with other pertinent facts about them. Yes, this is the right place!

Later on you pass by a new Chinese restaurant. You hold up your PDA, and there is a sample menu, along with the establishment's contact info and hours of operation. Yes! They deliver to your apartment!

I'm certain that you can think of much better examples, but an added benefit of this technology that jumps out at you right away is that signage could be almost completely done away with, providing an immense savings for businesses as well as a more aesthetically pleasing environment for everyone.

Can you picture this? Stay tuned.

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Huge Leaps Forward for Computing Power

The public is largely ignorant about developments in technology. Until, that is, they can buy it and take it home. But some people, like me, want to know what will be coming to our living rooms and offices before we can add it to our credit card balance. Why? Is it just so we can salivate as we imagine using it? No. It is so we can prepare ourselves, mentally and culturally, to make best use of it when it becomes available. Technological advances have become like a gathering ocean wave that we are furiously paddling to keep up with so that we can ride it.

A few quiet announcements are worth reading about along these lines...

Sun's Constellation System - The world's first petascale computing environment.

June 26, 2007 -- It was a mere decade ago that terascale computing took hold in science and engineering communities, giving researchers the tools to break new ground in physics, biomedicine, astronomy, and other areas. Now, Sun is ushering in a new era of high performance computing (HPC) with the Sun Constellation System, the world's first petascale computing environment.

Sun's unique approach to petascale computing combines state-of-the-art technology with system level innovation and off-the-shelf components in an open architecture. The result is a powerful HPC platform that is extremely powerful, easier to manage, and very cost efficient. A technology preview is being announced today; the shipping version will be available early next year.

NVIDIA's Tesla Architecture

• Massively-parallel computing architecture with 128 multi-threaded processors per GPU
• Scalar thread processor with full integer and floating point operations
• Thread Execution Manager enables thousands of concurrent threads per GPU
• Parallel Data Cache enables processors to collaborate on shared information at local cache performance
• Ultra-fast memory access with 76.8 GB/sec. peak bandwidth per GPU
• IEEE 754 single-precision floating point
• Scalable from one to thousands of GPUs
• Available in GPU computing processor, deskside supercomputer and 1U rack-mount GPU computing server

Uzi Vishkin's Desktop Supercomputer

A prototype of what may be the next generation of personal computers has been developed by researchers in the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering. Capable of computing speeds 100 times faster than current desktops, the technology is based on parallel processing on a single chip.

Parallel processing is an approach that allows the computer to perform many different tasks simultaneously, a sharp contrast to the serial approach employed by conventional desktop computers. The prototype developed by Uzi Vishkin and his Clark School colleagues uses a circuit board about the size of a license plate on which they have mounted 64 parallel processors. To control those processors, they have developed the crucial parallel computer organization that allows the processors to work together and make programming practical and simple for software developers.

These developments are coming faster and faster, so stay tuned.

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M.A.D. Becomes M.A.EM.D.

Everyone has heard of M.A.D., or Mutually Assured Destruction, which is the principle that has prevented a superpower nuclear holocaust to this point in human history. Simply stated, the nations with the capacity to launch massive nuclear attacks have been reticent about doing so because the result would be virtual annihilation for both attacked and attacker.

Now, another type of M.A.D. has appeared which I have termed M.A.EM.D. (pronounced maimed) for Mutually Assured Electromagnetic Destruction. Much of the world is now electromagnetically dependent. Anything with computer chips (and what doesn't have computer chips anymore?), especially anything that is connected to the Internet, is vulnerable to EM disruption. Everything from our banking system to our production lines to our public utilities is dependent on the Internet and thus vulnerable to disruption.

The world's major powers are therefore gearing up for all-out cyber war. According to a report in today's New York Times:

China, security experts believe, has long probed United States networks. According to a 2007 Defense Department annual report to Congress, China’s military has invested heavily in electronic countermeasures and defenses against attack, and concepts like “computer network attack, computer network defense and computer network exploitation.”

According to the report, the Chinese Army sees computer network operations “as critical to achieving ‘electromagnetic dominance’ ” — whatever that is — early in a conflict.

The United States is arming up, as well. Robert Elder, commander of the Air Force Cyberspace Command, told reporters in Washington at a recent breakfast that his newly formed command, which defends military data, communications and control networks, is learning how to disable an opponent’s computer networks and crash its databases.

“We want to go in and knock them out in the first round,” he said, as reported on Military.com.

An all-out cyberconflict could “could have huge impacts,” said Danny McPherson, an expert with Arbor Networks. Hacking into industrial control systems, he said, could be “a very real threat.”

Attacks on the Internet itself, say, through what are known as root-name servers, which play a role in connecting Internet users with Web sites, could cause widespread problems, said Paul Kurtz, the chief operating officer of Safe Harbor, a security consultancy. And having so many nations with a finger on the digital button, of course, raises the prospect of a cyberconflict caused by a misidentified attacker or a simple glitch.

Still, instead of thinking in terms of the industry’s repeated warnings of a “digital Pearl Harbor,” Mr. McPherson said, “I think cyberwarfare will be far more subtle,” in that “certain parts of the system won’t work, or it will be that we can’t trust information we’re looking at.”

Of course this is frightening. But it seems to me that those who have the wherewithal to do major damage, essentially the world's major economies, understand that any attack against the interests of another major power would certainly result in a devastating counterattack. And a counterattack would not necessarily be confined to the EM domain. After all, any cyberattack of significant power would be an attack on the victim's entire viability as a sovereign nation; such is the importance of our computer networks.

True, smaller rogue nations and terrorist organizations will launch attacks, but these kinds of entities would be less likely to possess the means to destroy another nation's entire computer systems.

In addition to M.A.EM.D., we can rely for our EM safety upon the fact that the world's major powers' self-interest dictates cooperation and harmonious relations with each other.

Am I being overly optimistic? I hope not. Stay tuned.

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Quantum Dots and Teleportation

The idea of transporting objects from point A to point B almost instantaneously and without travelling through physical space is not new. We have all seen it done on Star Trek and in the movie The Fly, but is it possible in the real world? Some researches believe they may have an idea about the medium to do it with: quantum dots.

According to recent research, tiny clusters of atoms known as quantum dots may be excellent media for quantum teleportation, a physics phenomenon in which information – in the form of a quantum state, a very specific mathematical “signature” of an atom – can be transmitted almost instantaneously to a distant location without having to physically travel through space. Teleportation is one facet of quantum information science, a developing field that could have a major impact on computing and communications.

We probably won't be seeing the teleportation of humans anytime soon, except in Second Life, but this is a step in the right direction.

Read more...

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How to Catch Photons and Accelerate Computing Speed

Have you ever thought about catching a photon? Before you assume that I am insane, consider that a photon, a particle of electromagnetic radiation, moving at the speed of light (naturally), should be catchable. All you would need to do is close the entrance before the photon can get out, once it comes in. And have some way to keep it from being absorbed or otherwise interacting with the inner surface of the trap. Right?

Something like that has been just been done by researchers at Cornell University. To what end? you ask. Transmitting signals in computers can be done better and faster with photons than with electrons, but photons are more difficult to control and so routing becomes an issue. Today, this routing of photons has to be done by converting the light pulses to electrons and back again to photons. Not very efficient. So a practical way of controlling the light pulses was needed.

Enter the Cornell researchers, who have developed a way to trap pulses of light and thus route them efficiently.

The new device relies on an optically controlled "gate" that can be opened and closed to trap and release light. Temporarily storing light pulses could make it possible to control the order in which bits of information are sent, as well as the timing, both of which are essential for routing communications via fiber optics. Today, such routing is done, for the most part, electronically, a slow and inefficient process that requires converting light pulses into electrons and back again. In computers, optical memory could also make possible optical communication between devices on computer chips.

Switching to optical routing has been a challenge because pulses of light, unlike electrons, are difficult to control. One way to slow down the pulses and control their movement would be to temporarily confine them to a small continuous loop. (See "Tiny Device Stores Light.") But the problem with this approach is getting the light in and out of such a trap, since any entry point will also serve as an exit that would allow light to escape. What's needed is a way to close the entryway once the light has entered, and to do so very quickly--in less time than it takes for the light to circle around the loop and escape. Later, when the light pulse is needed, the entryway could be opened again.

The Cornell researchers, led by Michal Lipson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at the university, use a very fast, 1.5-picosecond pulse of light to open and close the entryway. The Cornell device includes two parallel silicon tracks, each 560 nanometers wide. Between these two tracks, and nearly touching them, are two silicon rings spaced a fraction of the width of a hair apart. To trap the light in these rings, the researchers turned to some of their earlier work, in which they found that the rings can be tuned to detour different colors by shining a brief pulse of light on them.

Light of a certain color passes along the silicon track, takes a detour through one of the rings, and then rejoins the silicon track and continues on its way. However, if the rings are retuned to the same frequency the moment after a light pulse enters a ring, the light pulse will circulate between the rings in a continuous loop rather than rejoin the silicon track and escape. Tuning the rings to different frequencies again, such as by shining another pulse on one of the rings, allows the light to escape this circuit and continue on to its destination.

I don't know how the light feels about being trapped, but since they are quickly let go again I don't think they mind too much. Stay tuned.

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Nanotechnology and All Things Precise

What is the big deal about nanotechnology. Why are really tiny machines better than regular-sized machines? And why are engineered drugs supposed to be so much better than the ones we came up with before? And what makes smart bombs so smart?

These are just some of the questions many people find themselves asking whenever these topics arise in the news. They are good questions, and they all have the same answer: Precision. Yes, folks, in each case it is about precision. Let me explain.

Hundred dollar bills

Imagine that you are a normal person, with a normal income and normal tastes in consumer goods. OK, got that? There is only one thing strange about you. It's your money. All you have are $100 bills. When you get paid, they round down. When you pay for goods and services, they round up. This means that your weekly salary of $1099 is rounded to $1000. You lose $99 every week. Too bad, so sad. When you buy a 25 cent pack of gum (if you are foolish enough to buy only that), you have to pay, $100. A dinner bill of $35 including tip costs you, you guessed it, $100.

Precision in fabrication

That would surely suck, wouldn't it? Well, we've been doing something like that for many thousands of years. How so? you ask. Well, whenever we build a widget, for example, we round up on the materials we use to build it, simply because our tools can't be any more precise about it. But what if we could build that widget atom by atom? We would use not one more atom than is necessary. With lots of widgets we could save a bundle.

Precision in medicine

How about drugs, the medicinal kind? First, instead of taking a bunch of ingredients, mixing them together and trying the concoction on test victims, I mean subjects, to see what, if any, therapeutic effects might result, we would be able to build a molecule or compound exactly to order, made from the start to do exactly what we want it to do. Second, rather than manufacturing one drug to treat every headache, we could design and create one that's just perfect for you, based on your specific genetic makeup.

Further, wouldn't it be nice if, instead of having to swallow a pill that has to be dissolved in your belly, then absorbed through the lining of your intestines, float around your bloodstream until most of the molecules find the right address, they could all be targeted and delivered precisely where they are needed? Not a molecule wasted?

Killing the right enemy

And smart bombs, well, we're talking about not killing 15 people when we only need to kill one. (I'm am optimistic about the future, but the idea that we won't have bombs or killing...come on.)

This idea of making things more precise through technology is affecting you right now. One reason why there's so little inflation, why prices of most things are stable or falling, is because of technology. The companies that make and process and package and deliver and sell the milk you buy are all using computers and sophisticated algorithms to make sure they aren't wasting a drop of milk or a second of time. Of course, they are wasting many drops and many seconds, because the technology available has lots of room for improvement. But we are learning the advantages of precision.

So, now you know. It's time to start cheering for technology, for artificial general intelligence, and the singularity.

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Qubit Calculations

Researchers at Delft University of Technology have succeeded in carrying out calculations with two quantum bits, the building blocks of a possible future quantum computer. ~ Science Daily

Quantum computing has the potential to increase computing power to an almost unimaginable level. The reasons for this amazing potential have to do with how matter behaves at very small scales, where the laws of quantum mechanics come into play.

Richard Feynman, one of the world's most respected and beloved physicists and Nobel prize-winner, famously said "I think it is safe to say that no one understands Quantum Mechanics." This is because the way particles behave at this scale makes no intuitive sense. They take every possible path from point A to point B. They are here and there at the same time. Until you look at them. Then they quickly settle down into one place and one path.

How does this strangeness translate into seemingly infinite computing power?

In a traditional computer, information is encoded in a series of bits, and these bits are manipulated via Boolean logic gates arranged in succession to produce an end result. Similarly, a quantum computer manipulates qubits by executing a series of quantum gates, each a unitary transformation acting on a single qubit or pair of qubits. In applying these gates in succession, a quantum computer can perform a complicated unitary transformation to a set of qubits in some initial state. The qubits can then be measured, with this measurement serving as the final computational result. This similarity in calculation between a classical and quantum computer affords that in theory, a classical computer can accurately simulate a quantum computer. In other words, a classical computer would be able to do anything a quantum computer can. So why bother with quantum computers? Although a classical computer can theoretically simulate a quantum computer, it is incredibly inefficient, so much so that a classical computer is effectively incapable of performing many tasks that a quantum computer could perform with ease. The simulation of a quantum computer on a classical one is a computationally hard problem because the correlations among quantum bits are qualitatively different from correlations among classical bits, as first explained by John Bell. Take for example a system of only a few hundred qubits, this exists in a Hilbert space of dimension ~1090 that in simulation would require a classical computer to work with exponentially large matrices (to perform calculations on each individual state, which is also represented as a matrix), meaning it would take an exponentially longer time than even a primitive quantum computer.

Richard Feynman was among the first to recognize the potential in quantum superposition for solving such problems much much faster. For example, a system of 500 qubits, which is impossible to simulate classically, represents a quantum superposition of as many as 2500 states. Each state would be classically equivalent to a single list of 500 1's and 0's. Any quantum operation on that system --a particular pulse of radio waves, for instance, whose action might be to execute a controlled-NOT operation on the 100th and 101st qubits-- would simultaneously operate on all 2500 states. Hence with one fell swoop, one tick of the computer clock, a quantum operation could compute not just on one machine state, as serial computers do, but on 2500 machine states at once! Eventually, however, observing the system would cause it to collapse into a single quantum state corresponding to a single answer, a single list of 500 1's and 0's, as dictated by the measurement axiom of quantum mechanics. The reason this is an exciting result is because this answer, derived from the massive quantum parallelism achieved through superposition, is the equivalent of performing the same operation on a classical super computer with ~10150 separate processors (which is of course impossible)!! (Jacob West, 2000)

Didn't follow that? Not to worry. What it boils down to is that quantum computing, if fully realized, could easily perform calculations that a universe-sized classical machine would find impossible.

Is quantum computing only pie in the sky? No, it's not. Researchers are making solid progress towards its realization.

Now for the first time a 'controlled-NOT' calculation with two qubits has been realised with the superconducting rings. This is important because it allows any given quantum calculation to be realised.

The result was achieved by the PhD student Jelle Plantenberg in the team led by Kees Harmans and Hans Mooij. The research took place within the FOM (Dutch Foundation for Fundamental Research on Matter) concentration group for Solid State Quantum Information Processing.

Stay tuned.

Source: ScienceDaily

Via BetterHumans

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How the Brain Works: Jeff Hawkins

Understanding how the human brain works is part and parcel of technological singularity. Strong AI, building computer substrates that can accept and run a human mind, augmenting the human brain with implantable computer chips, all these things require a deep and detailed understanding of how the brain works.

Jeff Hawkins, in this video, delivers a fascinating explanation of his overarching theory of the brain:

To date, there hasn't been an overarching theory of how the human brain really works, Jeff Hawkins argues in this compelling talk. That's because we still haven't defined intelligence accurately. But one thing's for sure, he says: The brain isn't like a powerful computer processor. It's more like a memory system that records everything we experience and helps us predict, intelligently, what will happen next. Bringing this new brain science to computer devices will enable powerful new applications -- and it will happen sooner than you think.

You will thoroughly enjoy this 20-minute talk.



Via Cheesobacillus furiosus

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Transparent Transistors Invented

Picture this: Bright, high-resolution maps displayed on your car's windscreen. Roll-up, see-through computer screens. TV on the lenses of your eye-glasses.

All of these and more are possible with OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diodes) technology, which is already transparent and can be put on bendable materials. But until now, the transistors that control each display's OLED pixels, weren't. An article on Technology Review explains:

Researchers at Purdue University and Northwestern University have now made flexible, see-through transistors using zinc-oxide and indium-oxide nanowires. By contrast, the amorphous or polycrystalline silicon transistors used in existing displays are not transparent. The new transistors also perform better than their silicon counterparts and are easier to fabricate on flexible plastic.

Nanotechnology has again opened new avenues for our accelerating drive into the future.

The nanowire transistors have high electron mobility, which determines how fast the transistor can work and how much current it can carry. In fact, the mobility is a few hundred times better than it is for transistors made from amorphous silicon, which is widely used in the electronics for displays. Because of that, the transistors could be made smaller and faster, Janes says. More-compact transistors, he says, would mean an even larger pixel area. What's more, the nanowire transistors are much easier to make on plastic than silicon transistors are because they don't need high-temperature processing.

As always, stay tuned.

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Shooting Electrons One at a Time: Quantum Computing Comes Closer

It turns out that one of the things you have to do in order to develop a quantum computer is to emit individual electrons from a semiconductor in nanosecond timescales. Here's a brief refresher on what makes quantum computing different from the conventional kind:

Classical computers process information by performing operations on successive "bits", which can be either 0 or 1. Quantum computers, on the other hand, use the phenomenon of entanglement to operate on quantum bits, or "qubits", which can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. The ability to process many values simultaneously should in principle mean that quantum computers can vastly outperform their classical counterparts when performing certain tasks.

Don't know what "entanglement" is?

Quantum entanglement is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which the quantum states of two or more objects have to be described with reference to each other, even though the individual objects may be spatially separated. This leads to correlations between observable physical properties of the systems. For example, it is possible to prepare two particles in a single quantum state such that when one is observed to be spin-up, the other one will always be observed to be spin-down and vice versa, this despite the fact that it is impossible to predict, according to quantum mechanics, which set of measurements will be observed. As a result, measurements performed on one system seem to be instantaneously influencing other systems entangled with it.

Now that you're all caught up, what's new is that French physicists have developed a way to build a qubit, by "confining electrons to two dimensions in a semiconductor."

Quantum dots have been used as single-electron sources before, but the device made by the French group is the first to be able to emit and absorb electrons over intervals of just a few nanoseconds, which makes the device's speed comparable with present-day electronics. They did this by assuming that the quantum-dot and gate components are analogous to a resistor and capacitor in series, then used RC circuit principles to calculate the combined impedance of the quantum dot and gate, and therefore how frequently electrons would be emitted from the quantum dot given the voltage across the system.

You'll recall that quantum computing is one of the new paradigms that will allow computers to continue their march towards strong AI and consciousness after the laws of physics prevent classical computer chips from getting any smaller or faster.

This development is just another important step in that direction. Stay tuned.

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