What’s going on in California now will have an impact on Boston Computer Networking Support sometime in the, not so far off, future.
Somewhere behind the thick walls of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose, scientists are busy teaching a computer chip to learn from what it sees, kind of like a human.
The effort is paying off, if performance at Pong is any measure. When the chip, part of a project called SyNAPSE, first learned to play the classic videogame in March, it did poorly. Weeks later, the company reports, it was nearly unbeatable.
“Computers were originally designed to solve math problems and that’s what they’re really good at—symbolic computation,” says Steve Esser, one of three scientists teaching the SyNAPSE chip. “Anything that involves visual processing, auditory processing, or speech processing—they can do it, but they’re just not very good at it.”
Have you given much thought to what humans might be like in the year 2020? Here’s what Brian David Johnson of Intel, the world’s biggest chipmaker, spends quite a bit of time thinking about: the future—the year 2020, in fact.
“To be a human in 2020, it will begin to feel like data is taking on a life of its own,” he says. The proliferation of computing into everyday objects will generate massive quantities of sensor and other data, with algorithms talking to algorithms and machines talking to machines, he adds. “That algorithm—that thing that processes that massive amount of data—will need to have an understanding of what it means to be human.”
Every generation seems to be amazed by new ideas and inventions that were unimaginable to their ancestors not too long ago. Can you just imagine the changes that will take place in your lifetime? It’s a fast paced world we live and and technology is taking us places faster than we could have dreamed of. You’ll have to keep up, we’ll help you.
If you would like to read more about this in the Businessweek article, just click here.
