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ThinkCycle: Solving World Problems With A Cluster of Brains
eaglemoon writes: "ThinkCycle is an MIT Media Lab project to apply SETI@Home principles to design problems for underserved communities. Only, intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles.' Their aim is to build a community of designers, inventors and innovators that want to collaborate on developing novel solutions to some what intractable problems like clean water access , cholera treatment and appropriate shelters. Their aim is to encourage an "open source" ethos for tough design and technology challenges."
That should probably be 'apply SETI@Home principles to design challenges." If the communites are underserved, they have enough problems already without designing more.
you will be providing the lazy-boys w/ a hole cut out of the head rest, as well as the necessary implants to the back of my head where a spiky-thingy can be shoved, right? and for the hardcore there is always the "donate some spare electricity" version complete with plexiglass goo-bucket and full interface including "liquified dead" being "intraveneously fed" into my blood stream?
cool
My life in the land of the rising sun.
In preparation for being slashdotted, they have already posted a mirror site link.
...problems is more CPU.
-- SIGFPE
According to a press agent for Microsoft, MIT's project "ThinkCycle" is nothing more than a smoke screen for anti-capitalistic "Viral Thinking". Microsoft has long established thinking is best done for multinational corporations that are engaged in the accumulation of capital. Thinking outside of the confines of a corporation with a group is nothing more than anti-capitalism. Projects seeking to provide clean water and the treatment of cholera are just pretty window dressing of this Anti-American activity.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
So this is a wonderful idea..
I somehow do not see this working. Of course I'd be happy to be proved wrong, but how do they plan
on breaking these big, complex, problems up into manageble pieces?
How can they make all these peoples ideas work together without it all turning into a watered-
down compromise-type idea without any edge?
I, for one will be interested in seeing the
results of this experiment..
FPSA is an intellectual masturbation exercise for privileged eggheads. They don't expect any of the "solutions" to actually be implemented.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
His infant son recently passed away from SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) and he's been enlisting people who've got some spare time to throw it at creating a baby monitor that can be used to collect statistics so in time, that information can be used to determine what symptoms cause SIDS. So far he's gotten tons of responses.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Sorry, but any "spare cycles" my brain has are going towards figuring out how I'm gonna pay my bills in this piss-poor economy.
an overgrown newsgroup. Or a benevolent (now that's mind boggling) Slashdot.
;)), but more often than not ideas get thrown around online pretty quick and easily...and then nothing comes of them.
The primary problem with anything like this is going to be the fact that just like in Usenet, people - valuable, vital people - will move on due to lost interest, changes in their lives, and the fact that anything like this started over the net tends to die off pretty quickly.
There are exceptions notably some software projects (What I can't imagine
Do you know why the road less traveled by is littered with the bones of the unwary?
Looking at it this way, this system is simply a clearinghouse for problems people find interesting. If people work to break these big problems into manageable and concrete pieces, then these little pieces may be perfect for undergraduate or even graduate students to work on. I know that such a clearinghouse would be very valuable in mathematics. I've always imagined that such a thing would exist before too long for the mathematical community, and this would be a good thing.
The main reason that I think this would be a good thing is that for a young researcher starting out, one has to spend a lot of time understanding the big picture of a certian field, and generating good open problem on one's own. Such a system could bring the problems to the researchers more quickly. This could speed the process up by quite a bit. Such a thing sort of exists already, in the form of preprint servers, and I'm sure there's more to come! What doesn't really exist now is such a "big picture" fremework in a public domain, IMHO.
Come on, give it up, that's
Communism? Hmmm that would entail living in communes wouldn't it? I don't think there is any proposal in there that we start living in communes.
Frankly I call it "nice" maybe even "fun". And since when is not getting paid not getting benefit? "Something to do" is often a benefit in and of itself. Never mind actually solving these problems will make life better for others... which doe shave an overall effect on the community at large.
I mean really... when a friend asks you to help them move, do you respond with an hourly rate, or do you just show up ready to haul boxes? I know what I do.
-Steve
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Now that they've reinvented the scientific method, maybe they can reinvent some much needed things like the wheel and fire.
This proposal is just how Baconian scientific research has always existed. So what if this group, among many others, starts working on clean water and other standard-of-living improvements. There's nothing innovative about the proposal at all.
Why limit "open source ethos" to advancing the human race? Why not use it to get the average /. geek laid? Yes, all of you with your spare sex cycles, come together [no pun intended] and embace the wonder of the human body!
* puts on his tin hat and hides under the desk *
"Their aim is to encourage an "open source" ethos for tough design and technology challenges."
Redesign the wheel and tell the underserved community members to RTFM if they have a problem using the redesigned wheel?
[o]_O
A lot of problems in third world development and disaster relief are not cash-limited, they're brain limited: we really do not know the best ways of treating epidemics in places without any decent high tech infrastructure, for example. Innovative ideas and approaches help: I've seen structures at Burning Man which were a lot better for their purpose than yer average disaster relief tent.
I think opening the design process up to the widest possible collaboration and really encouraging people to follow through could make a difference: kinda like the Simputer project may: a diversity of minds, of approaches, may be the best way to help the poor and the starving.
We can't wait for government to feed the people, you know? Too big, too slow. It's up to us. And it always has been - this is just one more way to help.
Hexayurt - open source refugee shelter,
Some of the problems in handling this approach is that unlike the SETI, etc. way of doing things, where a client goes out, grabs a chunk of data to be worked on, then sends the resultant data back to the server, each of these social/governance problems *aren't* a mathmatical formula. You can't just apply the same formulae to every problem. There is no "right" way to do it.
/. postings on "getting in the zone"]. This means that while people may not be thinking about work during their lunch hour, they will have a difficult time getting back to thinking about work when they are done [or getting into the mindset of whatever problem needs to be solved]
Computers are also good at multitasking, whereas humans [aside from life-functions] have for the most part, a single tasking thought processes. It also takes people a non-trivial amount of time to context switch [see various
Human filter. Again, unlike the SETI idea, a human needs to filter all the resultant data, as by definition, new ways of solving problems don't fit into a previously known idea. say you do get several thousand people working on this project, the resultant data will be huge, *and* every human filter will filter the information in their own way, there is no "control".
That being said, new ideas come from all around us. Who knows what this experiment can yield.
.
Blocklevel: Practical Information Architecture
Too often we tend to see the world in terms of technology (as in computers). Open source has alot to offer the "digital divide" but this fails to consider that in many places of the world you have to overcome the "sewage divide" and "electicity divide" before you can even have a digital one. I think an "Open Source" type solution is a good idea for providing for the more basic needs of poor countries.
As an example of this, I was in Haiti on vacation in December (I hate relaxing vacations...I can relax at work) and it is quite amazing how much human time and energy is spent just keeping clean, getting drinkable water, cooking, in a place where the population doesn't have access to plumbing or electricity. I figured it would be about 3 to 4 extra hours of work each day...time that cannot be spent at another job, learning to read or just having time enough to consider your own existance.
Selling fresh produce for extra cash is difficult becuase of poverty of your potential customers and lack of refrigeration limits the time that it can be sold, cooking it requires getting charcoal from a vendor (this is why Haiti is deforested), raw sewage on the streets makes whatever food that is cooked still risky (in this suburb of Cap Hatien the tallest structure in town was a two story pile of dried sewage in the middle of the street.)
Clearly something needs to be done, and all the other plans have always had contracts, agreements and treaties tied in that equalled that only a few people would profit from a "project" but the situation of the general population would remain unchanged. I hope engineers, earth scientist and botanists get involved in this.
Given that the devil in most large systems is in the number of inter-dependencies, not the complexity of any one given component, not having everyone involved relatively close in meatspace is going to make re-constituting a total solution based on the individual component solutions quite difficult indeed.
<mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab>
But atleast this project is has more societal value than some of the other a virtual dog that you can pet.
</mandatory-lcs-grad-rip-on-the-media-lab >
Remember innovation is 99% persperation, and 1% insperation. Looks like they are focusing on the 1%, and assuming that the rest will take care of itself.
I don't have all the answers, but I do know that these third world areas are in desperate need of people to do some work. Someone to come in and create a stable goverment (that will not starve opponents). Teachers to show them how to think. There is a total glut in the food market. (The US could easially supply all the world's nutrirtion needs if people would be willing to live food that doesn't taste good)
AIDS is a large problem in Africa. We don't have a cure, but we know how to prevent the spread. However most goverments in Africa are doing little to prevent the spread. (In fact some are actively doing things to cause more cases - at least in groups they don't like) We could use a cure, but until there is a cure, we don't need more non-biologists thinking about AIDS (where they are unlikely to make progress), but we could use those same people in Africa teaching people how to prevent aids. Of course if you actually go to Africa you will soon discover that other problems need to be solved before the AIDS problem can be solved.
We don't need more thinkers, we need more doers. That is much harder. I can go home tonight and think about a methane digester that can be used in a mud hit. I can't go to a village and build them after work tonight.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those.....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
From what I understand MENSA was created with the same idea, the brightest people solving the worlds problems. Unfortunatly as it has turned out to be more of a status symbol demonstrating how smart you are. Still if this does do what it's supposed to it could be very effective,there is no limit of brilliant ideas floating around out there but what is required is a dedicated group of people to apply effective implementations. A group of dedicated intelligent volunteers may just be able to do this (it's worked with open source).
I stole this Sig
All your brains are belong to us...
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
All of society's most complex and vexing problems, convenienty broken down into small, manageable chunks so that millions of individuals would each be able to derive a little personal gain from voluntarily solving some small aspect of the big picture and all of them could come together to build complex and beneficial systems for all mankind!
Why, that would be GREAT!!
I have a name for it, too: we'll call it: Capitalism!
Now if they just make the next project "novel ways to remove people who don't help us from the gene pool"
;)
Don't worry, im all over that one. You see i figured that considering the current state of the USPTO that i would apply for "a method of using deoxyribonucleic acids to create unique and distinct characteristics among individuals"
after my patent on DNA is approved i shall charge a 1 dollar licensing fee among all humans.
Of course should you choose to not pay my fee, or i refuse to license to you i shall be forced to remove all of your unlicensed DNA... so you see, i shall have exactly the answer to the problem you would like answered
Let's say someone has a brilliant idea for waste water treatment. How is ThinkCycle going to test that that idea works? It can't just run a computation or ask a bunch of random people to verify the idea. You need to build a pilot and try it out. Well, the mechanisms for evaluating what ideas work and what ideas don't already exist, and they are already distributed: publications, peer review, libraries, conferences, symposia, citation statistics, recommendations, talks, etc. The mechanisms by which you do cooperative problem solving already exist, and they have existed for hundreds of years. They are the mechanism by which we collaborate in science, technology, engineering, and the economy. And there has been very active research in supporting them with computers, through groupware, electronic communications, and many other means.
As for the site itself, it looks to me like a fairly regular groupware site. It's nice that someone set up a groupware site to discuss these topics. I find it somehwat ironic, though, that a site which writes "Open Source Design" on its banner has so many DOC and PPT files.
seti@home works because they know exactly what needs to be done and exactly how to do it. They just need more CPU cycles to actually carry out the well-defined well-understood steps.
That's not true for the kind of problems being discussed here. How do you split the problem of, say, clean water access, into a bunch of little chunks that just require someone to think about in their spare time? It seems to me that to do that, you have to already know how to solve the problem!
There seem quite a few people concerned about it not working because problems will be too complex. Two cases that this could be so suited too. Both effective yet so simple. 1 - the clockwork radio. 2- The guy that recenbtly realised that if you put one pot inside another, fill the gap with wet sand, the evaporation of the water makes it act as a crude fridge. The idea is now sweeping across africa & co. In both cases, the execution is so simple it was the original idea that eluded everybody. This is the sort of thing that ThinkCycle could achieve.
Too many visionaries and too little "workers" will cause internal squabbling and infighting.
You need one visionary with a veritable dictatorship over an idea, and bunch of hard workers that do as they're told. This is how Linux is successful.
If you start assembling all the smartest people to try to agree on one thing, they will come up with so many great ideas and they will all think they are right, and it will just stymie the entire effort.
Instead of sitting around thinking of ideas, go get off your ass and DO SOMETHING. An attempted but failed idea is much more important than a whole bunch of great ideas that never get implemented.
"Only, intead of donating spare cpu cycles, you donate spare 'think cycles'."
:)
Judging from the fact that their site crumpled within the first five minutes of slashdotting, I'm betting they'd rather have CPU cycles for at least another few hours.
This tagline is umop apisdn.
Too much cleanliness may be a problem. As some think
There are many philosiphers who long for a simpliler life. Of course many of the latter are not willing to actually give up the benifits of our modern life to get the benifits.
Anyone who works on these tasks should keep in mind that not everything that can be done for worse off people is a good idea. I can't answer the philisophical questions (at least not in a way that will convince anyone). I don't have the medical answers. However I do know to keep them in mind.
That scenario never occured to me before reading your post, but it is a pretty cool one... they could have tied it in well with the whole "you're only using 3% of your brain... ever wonder why?"
Uh oh, I hope whoever's farming that other 97% doesn't figure out that I'm on to them... they might try to elimi... urrrgh!!!
Slashdot comments... splitting hairs since 1997.
... that is only part of the problem. A bigger problem is the lack of stable governments that look after their people as opposed to oppressing them for the greed of a few. Hatred, greed, desire for power and factional fighting are the primary reasons we have impoverished nations.
Altruism.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"what part of "society's most complex and vexing problems" is solved by the creation of the 'singing big-mouth bass'?
That Jesus Christ guy is getting some terrible lag... it took him 3 days to respawn! -NJ CoolBreeze
"History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme." Mark Twain
Academia.
You've heard of universities and tenured professors, right? This is exactly what they do, day in and day out.
Come on, give it up, that's
...because I'm heavily reminded of Marc Siegler's nifty SF novel Earthweb . I commend it to everyone's attention for its depiction of the functioning of "idea futures" markets. (Contrary to an earlier troller, a very capitalistic idea.)
Yeah, go ahead and mod me down for "Offtopic", punk.
Come on, give it up, that's
Reminds me of decision markets. Caught this link from a presentation by Vernor Vinge:
decisionmarkets.pdf
The proposition in the article is that we waste our time trying to solve things we already pay the governments to solve, without the prizes of freedom (you'll still live under a DMCA/DRM world and won't be able to chop George Bush with an axe no matter how many children you save or how many epidemics your work avoids).
I'm still for the good old-fashioned plain Anarchy.
fnord
Scarcity of good ideas and good intentions is not the problem. What is rare is implementation. It's nice that people want to do good, but many do-gooders have a very limited capacity for managing a project to completion.
Another thing I don't see here is an incentive to cooperate. Most contributors will assume that their own aproach to cholera or low-income housing is The Right Way. If they cooperate with other people, they risk having to work on some other approach, and losing their proper recognition as The Prophet of The Right Way.
WWJD for a Klondike Bar?
Don't underestimate people!
Don't assume Africa is full of people unable to help themselves given the opportunity. What is missing in many regions is education, and information. The New Scientist has some interesting material in the last 4 issues concerning these matters - with innovative use of basic technologies such as Radio / street plays / print conveying information that can be used locally to improve quality of life greatly.
You don't need a cure to fight AIDS in most regions - you need education. FOr the past 20 years the majority of the developing world has been unaware that AIDS is sexually transmitted. Make this known, and you reduce infection rates. Simple. The questions changes from how do we cure AIDS, to how to we communicate the FACTS about AIDS.
Those are questions currently being dealt with by charity health workers - I reckon a random selection of guys in the pub could come up with better ideas (at least, NEW ideas which would be worth testing).
This IS a great idea. I'd play!