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Grand Challenges For The Next 20 Years
terrapyn writes "Infoworld is reporting: 'A group of British computer scientists have proposed a number of grand challenges for IT that they hope will drive forward research, similar to the way the human genome project drove life sciences research through the 1990s.' Did they get it right? What are some other worthy computing challenges?"
VM/CMS with a GUI would ROCK!
A battery, a really good battery. Something that'll make my laptop last as long as my Palm. Or maybe power a light-saber... But really all we need for our dreams to come true is a good battery.
Trying to use sarcasm in text-based forums does not work.
Make Windows secure.
Support the mob or mysteriously disappear.
I didn't see anything that hasn't already been proposed many times before. Also, the article was short, and the descriptions were very general and boring.
**yawn**
They're setting these as goals for the next 15 years... but who really knows what's going to happen 15 years from now? If Moore's law holds (and we have no reason to think it won't), we'll have almost 2^10 times the computing power we do today. That's a huge number!! Setting these goals is a nice idea..., but who knows what the world has in store.
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
We are being buried in data and are just beginning to adapt the crudest methods for organizing it and mining it. If in 20 years we have not solved the problem of dealing with giant piles of data, then IT will become a cost instead of a benefit.
How about an OS that doesn't suck?
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
What about all the fanciful things we were supposed to have "By the year 2000!"?
What a joke that turned out to be. I'm still making calls with an audio-only phone and I have yet to come across a practical hover-car.
I'm a big tall mofo.
a decent IT system that can manage the projects we've been waiting for. Namely, the flying car and Duke Nukem Forever. One day we'll see this future materialize.
Browse the Information Directory
I think we need to develop cell phones that can cook, clean, and drive my car. For $25. Oh, and I guess they need to be able to send and receive phone calls.
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
The problem of keeping memories for life isn't one of technology. Its one of fire, theft, vandalism, keeping your files on a usb flash drive in your shirt pocket as you bend over the toilet.
I have data that is still intact from 1980, 25 years ago, because I have taken care to keep copying it to backup media, current media (tapes to CDs to DVD, etc.)
Point being, we can keep data for as long as we're interested in investing the time and money to do it right. Just because some fool can't learn how to backup his data doesn't mean that technology should take over. He probably wouldn't keep all his data with a RAID the size of Nebraska.
And they said zombies weren't real!
Here's a challenge: A patient comes into a doctor's office with a bacterial infection. Worse, it's one of those antibiotic resistant bugs. What we need to be able to do is:
- sequence the bacteria's DNA right there in the doctor's office (this part isn't really an IT challenge)
- from the bacteria's genetics, determine which antibiotics (out of all known ones) can effectively kill it
- if none can effectively kill it, ship the DNA sequence information off to the CDC's supercomputers, and have them automatically develop a new antibiotic that will kill the bug.
I figure that this is a challenge for the next forty years, not just for the next twenty.
Come on people, we need to break the one million mark on the number of different text editors for unix based systems!
http://www.gentoo.org/
Keeping people employed for more than five weeks?
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
we've been very close to this before. for example, the old VAX machines(I think thats what they use) that oil refineries use are near fail-less, but definitely not perfect, because I know about them second hand as a result of a failure. These systems are used in industries like I mentioned where commands need to be sent and processed as fast as possible, without the clutter of background programs that commercial OS's like Windows, Linus, and Macintosh. but anyway this Grand Challenge is a)achievable in the industrial sector, and b)not achievable commercially. The benefit in the industrial sector is the prevention of single errors which can cause hundreds of millions of dollars worth of damage, or even worse things. In the commercial sector, however, the need isn't that great to provide the money that will allow this to happen, and of course OS's would have to be completely redesigned. However, once it happens in the industrial sector, it could possibly cross pollinate to the commercial sector, but I doubt it will in the prominent OSs
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
I know! I'll develop a new type of database that is indexed by the degree to which the primary key sounds either "woody" or "tinny" when spoken. I'll make millions!!
Unknown host pong.
But I do not think that having having every device being able to interface with every device is a good idea.
I can see some day in the future where one device decides to mess up and take down all the devices it can touch, be it virus or glitch. I would hate for my toaster to be able to mess with my heart monitor. Also If all these devices are talking, what I do on my Palm could be transmitted through my blinky running shoes to Nike for them to "monitor me better". I for one like some incompatability.
Also the comment that all devices work the way we want them to is a pipe dream. There is no perfect device. There is always a feature that will be added that will be easy for some and hard to interface with for others. I think having a set of standars is a more reasonible dream.
I know that the exchange of information has been teleported, but someday, I'd like to see an actual object teleported within the next twenty years.
Or even a household quantum computer, capable of processing thousands of more spam messages in a blink of an eye! Cool!
That's a definite challenge, and worthy of a Nobel Prize, or something. ;-)
Stiny! Get me a danish!
Instead of 'systems that can't go wrong', how about making it more reaslitic. Maybe 'systems that don't go wrong all the fucking time'? Might be a bit ambitious in 20 years though.
This was interesting from page 13 of the linked BCS report:
Vision: applications
There are numerous applications of Memories for Life. In the next 5-10 years, we expect that the most progress may be made in systems that help people retrieve and organize their memories. For example, such a system might help a person find all memories, regardless of type, about his or her holiday in Germany two years ago; and also help organize these memories by time, location or topic.
Nice for someone who has Alzheimers. Or perhaps it would be nice merely to be able to classify the thousands of digital pictures I have taken with my digital camera over the last five years. I need a full time employee to index these photos into a database or imaging system....
Have you Meta Moderated t
Reverse IT outsourcing and get IT jobs for Americans. No greater challenge than that.
Of course releasing Duke Nukem is just too difficult to be listed.
And so is using M$ Windows for an entire week without burning, smashing or inflicting permanent damge on your computer (without using Cygwin of course). Obviously the last challenge is even more ridiculous, I mean yeah its not going to crash for an entire week (I believe in Santa too)
That's going to be the biggest challenge I'm going to have.
People think in 3d, for a computer to think in 3d all you need to do is code in a physics world with nouns and verbage. Its quite a task, but once you have it, you have true AI and the revolution that comes with it. Its doable, I'm suprised no corporation has tried it yet.
A computer system that will pass the Turing Test.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Simulated sex should be our next challenge, sex has already helped us, and will continue to help us, in pushing the limits of what's technologically possible.
Should be easy right? Never the less it has stumped slashdot editors for many many years.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I see the future using a lot more distributed computing and distributed technologies.
More programs like at distributed.net. Also cancer reseach, mapping the human genes, and SETI.
I see more distributed software technologies. Microsoft itself wanted to try "download and run" schemes, where you purchase a piece of software and then download some code chunk that allows you to run the program for only a single session.
In gaming Bit Torrent is a popular medium for patching games and Steam is certainly going to be a technology that I see many gaming companies jumping on.
The internet its self is distributed and was envisioned by ARPANET to be distributed.
So I see future research increasingly looking at ways to further distribute computing both in processing power, information gathering and information distribution.
There is or can be built a machine that can simulate any physical object. -Church-Turing principle
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
What about something that improves productivity and/or helps raise your standard of living?
This is where technology like Macromedia Flex comes in. I've seen this stuff in action, and the process of creating complex applications is so easy it's unbelievable. A field of sortable and stretchable columns can be generated with about three lines of code, and the data that goes into it can come from any application server you like.
Sure, anything that uses the Flash player gets a hammering on Slashdot, but I sense that times are a changing around here and more people are starting to wake up to the potential of this stuff, even if it goes a little against the open source ethos of the place.
BTW, if you're a member of the "Flash sucks and I hate it because some people used to abuse it by making annoying animations with it" brigade, see my journal where I've already refuted your half-baked criticisms.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
...getting rid of SPAM !
What are some other worthy computing challenges?
;-)
Making Firefox on Linux as quick as Firefox on Windows...
Write a program that can compete with or beat the best players of Go ( http://senseis.xmp.net/ )
Thats how I felt until I got the new version of Picasa from the google developers.
That really makes browsing through images so much easier. It found images on my computer that are a decade old! I've only had this machine for a year! I really do just forget about the old things I have backed up.
"The challenge is to allow people to gain maximum benefit from these auxiliary memories, while maintaining their privacy"
I don't see what's so "Grand" about that. It's already possible to some degree. Yeah, it would be nice to have better organization systems, etc. but I don't think it's gonna require a major breakthrough in science or anything.
...a replicator!
Tea. Earl Grey. Hot.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
How about an intermediate computer linguistic language for translations?
Let's say there's a chatroom with a guy from Poland, a girl from Japan, and a duck (this is not a serious example, obviously, and why they are in this chatroom is left to the user's imagination). The duck sends his message, and it gets scrambled into the intermediate language. This language can now be translated directly into any local dialect, without having to translate the message for each seperate language being used, or without the user having the know the language. Just imagine - a user from Russia chatting with a user from Mexico, and neither knowing the other is anything but their native tongue. Of course it's not meant to be a cultural mask or anything - certain language / cultural barriers would of course be present, but at least this is better than having to run to Babelfish every few seconds.
Verifying compiler? Correctness proving tools? Two words - Halting Problem.
It's the 21st Century - we're supposed to have flying cars already. But we can't even make a crummy phonecall anymore without getting ulcers. How about meeting the challenge of asking (by speaking their name) to speak with someone, any time, anywhere, and immediately being told either "hello!", or to wait a minute while they get free, or to leave a message, or to call back, or that the recipient is unknown (even if that's an anonymizing lie)? Reciprocally, how about getting told that someone (by name) is calling, and an offer to tell them one of those options (preconfigured for defaults), whispered by the "phone"? That will take not only voice recognition, but also some standard interfaces for call waiting/voicemail, across POTS/PCS/cell/VoIP. Since the damn phones barely work at all now, after over a century of "evolution", this certainly qualifies as a grand challenge.
--
make install -not war
I'm not a big dreamer. I just want ACL management in KDE and Gnome. This is great for offices getting off the Microsoft bandwagon.
http://bugs.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=62817
http://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=6976
Doom 4..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
No, I am not one of those New World Order types, I just think if you look at the rise and fall of the Roman empire, the US has folled very closely.
Oh stab me with a spoon.
That's funny...I usually like it better when my Palm outlasts my laptop. The other way around just gets too frustrating.
"Hardly used" will not fetch you a better price for your brain.
because it is true..
I like the memories for life one. It would be nice to have pictures and such saved away and easy to access.
Of course scanning in a huge box of random sized pictures is hard. Anyone know an easy way to do that? Document feeders look like they'd have to bend the picture to send it through.
Aren't we supposed to hit a point of no return with the planet's condition, in around 10 years? Isn't everything we do until then kinda pointless? :-)
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... time... to... die...
To achieve the goal of building dependable computer systems, the scientists suggest building a verifying compiler, a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run -- something first written about in the 1950s.
It isn't even possible to always decide whether a program will terminate, let alone 'work correctly'. Have the 'scientists' never heard of The Halting Problem?
Perhaps the scientists only meant a compiler that verifies programs from a very limited domain, but then the journalist should be shot for ridiculous exaggeration.
Stop spam, it seems all the fastest most futuristic achievements in technology can't seem to stop a simple thing like spam.
Meet new people, and kill them.
There is no such thing. Until we get an OS directly interfacing with our brains, some people will always dislike paticular OS's, maybe due to their command line base or their GUI base.
Once the search engines cache it, it is never forgotten. Doesn't mean its going to be found again.
There are several that are quite good, IMHO.
And ultimately, it depends on what you want, too.
Personally, I've had great experiences with all of the above OSes. While issues do crop up from time to time, it would be unwise to assume that they would not, in the future.
I thought fuel cells weren't rechargeable. As in rechargeable without pumping more Hydrogen into them. If it's not possible to recharge them as easily as you can a battery, it's not gonna succede very well. I don't think people will want to have to "Hydrogen up" their batteries like the "Gas up" their car.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Seriously. It seems like it shouldn't be that hard, but it is. So let's solve it already!
I am still waiting for some of the big problems from the 1950s, whose solutions were "just around the corner". These include:
...
- Automated language translation.
- Self-programming computers.
- Natural language understanding and interfaces.
- Image understanding.
These has migrated in and out of artificial intelligence over the decades.
Besides, this correctness mirage has been, since the dawn of computing, a holy grail that commerce wishes for but declares to be an actual BigGulp of poison Koolade everytime academic computer science serves it up. [witness Ada, witness the discussion of Coyotos on
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
The Seinfeld test is a special subset of the Turing test. The computer has to be able to make new and funny jokes. It has to be able to recognize humor and laugh.
It's out..
It's called OS X
You forgot
:).
- Get the patient to take the antibiotic all the way through
That's the crucial missing step that's let the nasty bugs get this far
You're reading Slashdot. Of course you like Linux and pc hardware
Bow down and worship my terrible challenge!
pleeeeease?!!!!
one of these days, just you wait and see!
* What we need is well-established software engineering practices. Not just whiz-kids who learnt C++ in their spare time managed by people who just reap the rewards. Best practices will give software engineer the right amount of appreciation at the price a decent education. Imagine getting heart surgery from a guy who read a book in his spare time.
How is the computer even going to know that the program is working correctly? I suppose it could parse the specs beforehand, and compare them with the source code. We'd need to write the specs in a machine-readable language, though.
Of course, we would also need a parser to determine if we wrote the specs correctly, possibly by using a third language that defines the way that specs are transformed from human language to machine-readable language.
Save the environment; most other things can be delayed. Discover efficient alternative energy sources to plant and fossil fuels; develop the materials and processes to implement these alternatives; build more detailed environmental models to aid in the study of the effects of pollution and the effects of tearing down natural habitats.
Real biometic integration... Usable voice recognition (not something that only understands a basic voice pattern, or one that has to be trained for different voices)...
Find SCO proprietary code in IBM Linux.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Howzabout, Portmon. Natilie and grits. Hot.
1. Instant-on computers. 2. Batteries that last 10x as long as now and charge in an hour. 3. Self-repairing OS, no crashes, viri, or loss of data...ever. 4. Voice recognition/commands for everything in the home and vehicle. 5. One phone number for all services (no separate #s for landline, cell, pager, fax, etc.) 6. Ala carte per hour fees for television. Get charged only by what you watch when you watch it. 7. Portable computer "guts" (storage/os/prefs, etc) that you can plug into a public unit and use outside the homebase while still keeping your own data intact and relatively secure. No bigger than a PDA. And one just for me... 8. A pleasure droid. Fully configurable ;)
The exact computation required to simulate a neuron sufficiently accurately is not known exactly, but we can put some reasonable estimates to it. I use 1 synapse firing = 1 bit +- factor of 30, which leads to a human equivalent = 3,000 Tflops (range 100-100,000 TFlops).
I will take as a proxy for 'largest computer available for AI research' the 500th computer listed in the top500.org list of most powerful supercomputers.
The trend has been for the #500 machine to grow at 93% per year in performance. A factor of 30 uncertainty in required performance thus only leads to a 5 year unceratinty in date.
3000 Tflops for the #500 machine would occur in 2017 at historical trend rates, to which I would add 5 years for software development/AI training, so the 'danger zone' for superhuman AI starts at 2017-2027.
SETI@home runs 65 Tflops currently on a distributed network, which is barely below my low end 100 Tflops estimate, so the risk of a runaway intelligence on a distributed network is non-zero (whether malicious or well meaning). The risk from a top ranking supercomputer is lower in my opinion. The #1 machine clocks 70 GFlops, but the top ranking machines are operated in a much more controlled environment.
If I was asked what will seal our doom, I would say it's the playstation 3. It will contain a 'Cell' processor jointly developed by IBM, Sony, and Toshiba. It's designed to be highly parallel, and it will be produced in mass quantities which will make it cheap. Thus it will will be well suited to MPP type supercomputers. I for one welcome our new Sony-based overlords...
What the hell do they think has been happening all these since it's introduction.
Shop smart, Shop S-Mart.
We must commit all our technological resources and know-how to once and for all solving the traveling salesman, towers of Hanoi and dining philosophers problems within our lifetimes!
20 years later, Free Software is flourishing. A whole operating system and a lot of additional software, even most Internet infrastructure is powered by software which can be adopted and improved freely. You can take part of the IT world without missing anything by not using non-free software at all, which has been impossible even five years ago. A few years later, Free Software might have overtaken proprietary software everywhere, even on Aunt Kate's desktop PC, her mobile phone and her TV.
Now replace "software" by "music", "video", "literature" or generally "media" and think 25 years back... that's our current situation.
Look up Lojban. Next question.
I imagine that we're only two or three years away from a system where small comsumer electronics devices can be aquired by putting links to a Ponzi scheme in all of your public correspondence. This will be the sum culmination of all human achievement.
~jeff
Imagine the possibilities of such an invention. Testing chemicals and medicines on animals would become an expensive, backwards way of ensuring the safety of consumers. Perhaps the simulation of an entire virtual organism would not even be necessary in many cases.. only the molecules (and many properties thereof) that make up the portion of skin and flesh to be tested against topical agents, for example. It sounds as if in the end it would have to be a sort of mini-Matrix.. maybe a virtual area 2 meteres squared where the global constants of Earth gravity, Newton's laws, etc. are emulated. This is beginning to sound like it would require a unified theory of everything. Perhaps some clever people with enough money to research this will figure it out.
It would most likely require quantum computers to have become a reality, so let's hope those come around in the next ten years. (Die, x86! Die!)
Don't worry. The HURD should be out by then. Maybe.
First order of business: run the verifying compiler on itself to prove it works!
Seriously, hasn't it been proven that program-checking programs are ultimately impossible? Or has Goebel's theorem been disproved?
It should be possible to port it to the PSP or something (I'm fairly sure it has the processing power), and I guess that could qualify as a PDA... The problem is just that the sources haven't been released yet. Any day now....
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
A computer interface where, if I click something involving something on another computer that is currently unavailable, it doesn't completely hose out on me for over five minutes, and then suddenly come back to life in a massive flurry of window activations and deactivations.
A web coding standard where I don't have to implement IE workarounds, "be nice to Opera" workarounds, box definition problem workarounds, CSS (lack of) support workarounds, just to get the look I am after without feeling like I am using greasy lego blocks in the dark to build a presentation of something for the world. The phrase "graphical interface layout language" drifts about my head often.
An IT department that, when they change the fixed IP addresses for important servers (Exceed On Demand, for example), the location of source scripts to invoke the engineering tools I use every day, and other important bits of info over a holiday break, thinks to inform the users of these little items so that the user has some clue when they come back from vacation WHY NOTHING IS FUCKING WORKING!!!!!!! I know you people read this site, and I know you know who you are.
--- Ban humanity.
On our Sun, a solar active region might be about the size of Jupiter, but it's controlled by the behavior of current sheets that are only a few meters across!
The problem is that cross-scale coupling like that really eats computing resources, because a volume that is n pixels across generally takes O(n^4) computing cycles.
True understanding of astrophysical plasmas (like the Sun, our Earth's space environment, the interstellar medium, or supernovae) and laboratory plasmas (like fusion generators) will require some kind of major breakthrough in simulation technique and/or computing power.
...Michael's relationship with Roland Piquepaille.
I don't know about all that other crap (I did RTFA), but I think they missed a biggie:
We need a new OS paradigm. Today we want security, elegence/usability, enhanced programmability (.NET, J2SE), but we don't want to go back and do the OS correctly. We're still working off clunky systems and clunkier languages that date back to the very beginning of computing.
Still using C/C++ as the foundation. God awful. Not that much faster, takes 5 times as long to debug, not nearly portable enough, and lets so many errors past our best programmers.
UNIX has somehow become the future. How is that possible? Wasn't that in the book of Genesis? Even UNIX's inventors have moved on spawning Plan9 and now Inferno.
And what the hell is Microsoft working toward?
Next, the GUI. Not a part of the OS, get over it. That said, has anyone given a thought to what we're exactly trying to do when we boot one of these things up? I'm trying to get shit done. But it seems the people at GNOME and Microsoft want me to play with their GUI and have a good party instead. These things have become increasingly anti-productive.
Most people agree that the OS is a "solved problem" from the research end of things. But for some fucking reason the people implementing it haven't gotten the memo and continue to disappoint grandly.
Where's my new OS? I don't want to use Open Solaris, Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, WindowsNT. I'm sick of that shit. Even stuff like SkyOS is just another C++ hack using a bunch of open source linux apps. Coyotos might be in the right direction, but we need more completely new OS's.
A drug that would persuade girls into sex. Always. Umm... not exactly an IT challenge, but I estimate that would free about 50% of disk space and internet bandwidth.
Seriously, this requires the ability to ensure that the "new anti-biotic" is, relatively, side-effect free on humans. This is more like a challenge for the next few centuries.
My mind works like lightning. One brilliant flash and it is gone.
Simulated sex should be our next challenge
Isn't this exactly the only kind of sex in which most slashdotters participate?
For those of you wanting to delve in the source for DTrace, check Bryan's blog. :)
He's on of the two key devs that brought DTrace to reality, and gives some good insight into the code. You can almost see him blushing like a proud new dad in his blog as well.
put the what in the where?
Unfortunately, none of these aspirations will materialize. IT in the U.S. and Europe is going to stagnate for the next 10-15 years, because the RIAA and MPAA (and their European equivalents) will continue doing everything they can to bring technology back to 1996 levels; and patents on algorithms and business methods will confound any new technology ventures.
Unless you have access to a crystal ball that actually works, you might want to replace all those assumptive "will"s with "might"s.
Whoa! Why is this post modded 0, Insightful? Is getting first posts on Slashdot a grand challenge for the next 20 years, or what? Just how is this insightful?
Oh well, maybe it's modded differently by the time you read this, in which case just ignore this.
Yeah, I was just going to write about it, along with my issues with it.
:(
In theory it is great language, parsable, non-ambiguos etc. In practice it has some problems of its own.
Basically, the sentence in Lojban is constructed as SVOOO(...) with S and O[1] replaceable by another "sentence". But in case of verbs like "go" the phrase "SUBJECT goes on OBJECT1 using OBJECT2" looks "S V O1 O2" -- the meaning of the objects is defined by their positions.
So it's like V(S, O1, O2, O3) -- in case of every possible verb one has to memorise meaning of O1, O2...O5. Some people in CS noticed oddity of such constructs and started to use arguments by name, as in html <img src="uri" alt="alternative text" border="0">. Similarly in human languages you usually use prepositions to distinguish objects (on road, with car), but not in Lojban/Loglan
Other than that Lojban seems fun, but somehow I couldn't force myself to learn hundreds of "functions" with mandated order of "arguments" -- I don't remember most of the libc functions on Linux and tend to look them up whenever I want to use them...
Robert
[1] it's not really a verb, since it can be e.g. "green" in which case sentence means Subject "is-green" like-Object.
Bastard Operator From 193.219.28.162
The grandest challenge would be inventing a portable LCD screen of some sort. OLED that unrolls, or a folding LCD, or whatever.. a portable color screen that consumes low amounts of power would really open the doorway to some very interestign and useful portable devices.
http://thepoliticalgeek.com/blog/ Politics for Geeks.
someone needs to think a bit more about these.
Simulation of life - not an IT problem. If biologists construct a valid model, then IT guys can simulate it without any trouble.
Global ubiquitous computing - this is a whole suite of related problems, none of which is individually hard.
Memories for life - this is part of the data organisation problem.
Scalable ubiquitous computing - this is part of the scalable complex structure problem.
Architecture of brain and mind - this could be an IT problem. IMO it will be solved by biologists constructing a good model of brain chemistry and giving a bit of detail on brain function, then the mind / software end of things will be obvious. But it's possible that a Very Clever Type might be able to construct a working mind model without this information, in which case they rank up with Newton and Einstein.
Dependable systems evolution / verifying compiler - this shouldn't be included. It's not practically useful: even in theory constructing meaningful assertions is same order of magnitude work as proving the program correct from first principles (Halting Problem), and this is _probably_ about the same amount of work as constructing and checking a truth table for your program - i.e. not feasible.
Non-classical computation - yes.
IMO, you could cut the list down to three genuine IT problems:
First: how to order and relate data in large quantities. If you prefer, design a better database with better searching. This problem seems to be fairly tractable, but the further into it you go the harder it gets (natural language queries require AI or close, relevance probably also does, searching efficiency is likely to be an issue, for a start).
Second: how to construct a scalable complex system. Note that the Internet is a crap example - DNS isn't scalable, and search engines, which play a large part in making the internet useful, are not scalable. This problem is actually sort-of solved: the answer is (probably) P2P: but constructing working and privacy-keeping equivalents to http etc. is not going to be easy, and developing a node linking protocol which gives reasonably efficient paths for information but doesn't result in bottlenecking through one machine on some poor sod's desk (or similar) will be hard. Implementing such a model in a useful situation will also be hard, but more a social problem than an IT problem.
Third: the last problem in the BCS list, non-classical computation.
Mod the parent funny if you want, but sim sex would drive debelopment of lots of cool new technology. The requirements are mind-boggling.
/. readers (and their partners) are already impractically large and heavy. I'm sure everyone reading has already thought of that one...
First, before any code could be written, you would have to integrate biology and psychology into a single unified theory just to get a handle on what sex really *is*.
Second, you would need code and hardware capable of simulating a human mind and body. Even the NSA's "It doesn't really exist, we promise" crypto-crunching supercomputers would choke on that task.
Third, you would need an interface. A full model person is going to be impractically large and heavy(*). It would also be difficult to change after it's built (and I don't think many potential sim-sex customers are going to want sim-monogamy). The best solution would be a direct neural interface, but that would require more new technologies.
If somene had the motivation (and the knowledge, and the money) to make sim sex work, it would be a huge boost to all sorts of science and technology. Get busy, pornographers!
* Don't bother posting the obvious joke about how most
0 1 - just my two bits
Aff.. just when I ran out of mod points.
I agree 100% with you: o buraco é mais em baixo.
Add to your list to be able to do all this without being locked in to any data format or proprietary application. For example, maybe Google Desktop Search can help you index all different kinds of files, but then you're completely dependent on that program for organizing your information. (Sure you don't need it to open your OO.org documents, but you won't be able to find the document you want to open without the software.)
Come on - everyone knows that we're waiting for our PCs to brew coffee. Heck people have been using CDROM drives as cupholders for years so we can't be *so* far off! Maybe if someone would rig up a coffee filter to the "exhaust" from their water cooling system... With all the new CPUs (*cough* Presscot *cough*) that heat up so nicely, it's not even such a farfetched idea. (Cool your CPU *and* enjoy hot fresh coffee!)
To achieve the goal of building dependable computer systems, the scientists suggest building a verifying compiler, a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run -- something first written about in the 1950s.
This, admittedly was in the summary text in the magazine, not the article by the scientists themselves, so it could be a case of "idiot summarizing it wrong", but there just is NO WAY to do what they are talking about. No how, no way.
To prove a program correct requires that you run it in a test environment. If you run it, and it is not correct, you get the same problem in your test run that occurs in the real run. Therefore you cannot test for a program's correctness automatically in a compiler. For example, any program trying to detect if a loop is infinite will itself end up looping infinitely when it encounters one and tries to check it.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
The Industrial Revolution period of the 20th Century saw plenty of raw innovation and creativity, in the form of putting critical infrastructure (like our nationwide power grid, highways, and railroads) together, so I don't see any reason to limit such innovation to the IT field.
I'd much prefer to see some of those challenges include things like, say, finding a permanent replacement (or set of replacements -- I have my doubts that there's a single solution) for petroleum-based energy sources and, as a direct result, eliminating our dependence on oil completely.
Finding a way to create a room-temperature superconductor could go a long way towards that. While such a challenge would certainly have applications within the IT field, it's certainly not directly related.
How about finding ways to keep the South American rainforests intact, but still support agriculture efforts? Seems to me that if the rainforests go, so does a big chunk of our world's breathable atmosphere, not to mention losing one of the biggest natural pharmaceutical sources on the planet.
Other non-IT ideas? Anyone?
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
or at least, a holodeck, and a cheep environmental source of energy would be a good start
I guess making a genuine artificial intelligence (and related sophisticated data processing tools) isn't a great idea anymore. Or maybe it's too big a goal? Long fall from the glory days of the 70's and 80's with such things as the 5th Generation Project.
The Infoworld story (and therefore the article submitter, the slashdot editor, and all the comments) totally mischaracterizes these challenges. They are challenges for computer science researchers, not for practical technology. They are supposed to be like Hilbert's challenges to mathematicians, which let to whole new fields of study. Think big and long term!
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
sure, freenet has some kind of anonymity but it's functionablity in the file distribution department is questionable at best.
so... come on guys, who's up for the challenge? who will save mankind?
PjotrP
in David Letterman voice: /. effect. /. properly.
10. Do whatever necessary to fix
9. Get Firebird (fox) to render
8. Get a top ten list generator for me, so I don't have to do this every time manually.
7. Virtual Sex to become better than Real Sex.
6. Cell phones embedded directly into brains.
5. Dude, I can count backwards!
4. Did I mention sex already?
3. Behaviour chips embedded into brains, actuated by cell phones.
2. Goatse in 3D - bigger, better and uncut!
1. Virtual Natali Portman, naked and petrified to pour hot virtual grits down my pants.
You can't handle the truth.
All operating systems suck... just sucks the least.
Have a look at their project description and it sounds like one of the goals listed
I want to be able to slot a chip into my handy behind-the-ear slot that will give me instant fluent Japanese or French or calculus.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
When I read 'verifying computer' in the article, I thought the same exact thing as the parent; i.e. "Ummm... has this asshole ever heard of the halting problem?!"
But then I remembered a loophole... You see, in the theoretical world, a Turing Machine has an infinite tape, and therefore and infinite number of configurations uqv. (Where q is the state, u is the contents of the tape left of the read/write head, and v is the contents under and to the right of the read/write head).
However, in the real world there is only a finite number of configurations since there is only a finite amount of memory. If each configuration was enumerated while the program in question was running, you would be able to see if a certain configuration was repeated. I.e., the computer is the exact same configuration as it was at a previous point in time - same state, same memory contents, etc. Viola - you have found a loop, or a program which doesn't halt.
So, in the real world, one of three things can happen:
1) The program halts
2) The program loops
3) The program exhausts the resources of the machine
The key is in option #3. The reason the halting problem is a problem in the theoretical world is because the program can run forever and never repeat configurations. In the real world, you will always get one of those three outcomes. Granted, you can never be sure if a the program eventually halts or not if you run into option #3, but if the program completely exhausts the memory resources of the system (or the universe) its pretty much a moot point now isn't it? That program would never be used.
I'm sorry - enumerate is not the right word. Replace 'enumerated' with 'displayed', 'printed', or otherwise 'outputted'. Is outputted a word?! :)
The reason i say this is that enumeration is another term in Theory of Computation which may confuse those informed individuals. Besides that, its just not the right word... sorry again for the confusion.
"No surprise considering that applications are getting heavier and heavier... Most programmers no longer care about optimizing their code, as they used to (and had to) some yea"rs ago."
Give this man a cigar.
I've said for years there are no real programmers anymore. Everyone seems to use cut-and-paste scripts and languages so bloated with overhead that a simple PRINT function compiles to several kilobytes. And execution is so damned slow because of all the overhead.
I've often wondered what execution time would be for something like a game coded in assembly language with no OS or other outside calls.
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Once reading and writing were considered subjects only a few experts could ever aspire to.
Now we realize that everyone can learn how read and write. We have learned how to teach everyone, not just the people who are the easiest to teach, but everyone.
So too with arithmetic and algebra.
I propose that programming is something everyone could learn, but that we have only bothered, so far, to figure out how to teach it to the people hard wired to pick it up the easiest.
Programming, like music and math, are subjects everyone could learn if we only took the problem seriously enough and acknowledged that not everyone gets tripped up on exactly the same points. We need to find most of the tripping points for people who are not born programmers and start writing courses and books that dwell on those points, instead of rushing past them.
Where are the freakin' robots already???
Paging Clinton! Paging Bill Clinton!
It was Monica who got a handle on things.
After a quick scan of the research pdf's TOC, I found that most of the research topics are Microsoft-biased, such as "life-long data recording", "scalable computer architecture", etc.
So, not very credible, even though computer masters like C.A.R. Hoare starred in these pdfs.
It's taken the Amiga ten years already and they still haven't produced anything worthy since the original. Maybe give them another 20 or so years and they'll have a marketable product that would have sold well if it was brought out 50 years ago.
"rchitecture of brain and mind: Once seen as a matter for philosophical debate, explaining the connection between the brain (as computing machinery) and the mind (as a virtual software machine) is increasingly becoming a scientific problem of interest in the development of information processing systems;"
Terminator 2...
From the BCS report:
A verifying compiler is a tool that proves automatically that a program is correct before allowing it to run. Program correctness is defined by placing assertions at strategic points in the program text, particularly at the interfaces between its components. These assertions are simply executable truth-valued expressions that are evaluated when control reaches a specific point in a program. If the assertion evaluates to false, then the program is incorrect; if it evaluates to true, then no error has been detected. If it can be proved that it will always evaluate to true, then the program is correct, with respect to this assertion, for all possible executions. These ideas have a long history. In 1950, Turing first proposed using assertions in reasoning about program correctness; in 1967, Floyd proposed the idea of a verifying compiler; and in 1968, Dijkstra proposed writing the assertions even before writing the program.
Early attempts at constructing a verifying compiler were frustrated by the inherent difficulties of automatic theorem proving. These difficulties have inspired productive research on a number of projects, and with the massive increases in computer power and capacity, considerable progress has been made. A second problem is that meaningful assertions are notoriously difficult to write. This means that work on a verifying compiler must be matched by a systematic attempt to attach assertions to the great body of existing software. The ultimate goal is that all the major interfaces in freely available software should be fully documented by assertions approaching in expressive power a full specification of its intended functionality.
But would the results of these related research projects ever be exploited in the production of software products used throughout the world? That depends on the answers to three further questions. First, will programmers use assertions? The answer is yes, but they will use them for many other purposes besides verification; in particular, they are used to detect errors in program testing. Second, will they ever be used for verification of program correctness? Here, the answer is conditional: it depends on wider and deeper education in the principles and practice of programming, and on integration of verification and analysis tools in the standard software development process. Finally, is there a market demand for the extra assurances of reliability that can be offered by a verifying compiler? We think that the answer is yes: the remaining obstacle to the integration of computers into the life of society is a widespread and well-justified reluctance to trust software.
But battery consumption has outstriped it. Just think about where all that heat is coming from.
... No clue!
The Halting Problem (or, more precisely, Rice's theorem -- a corollary to the unsolvability of the Halting Problem) merely states that one cannot generally prove non-trivial properties of programs. However, that does not mean that one cannot prove such properties for _specific_ programs. Indeed, there already are experimental compilers that prove non-trivial properties of programs. The trick is to err on the safe side: Reject the program if it either is provably incorrect or if establishing a proof of correctness turns out to be too hard.
Better get the battery before the lightsaber. Could you imagine Luke battling Darth when suddenly his lightsabre sputters out:
"I knew I should have gotten Duracell-2330's. Damn cheap flux-ion batteries!"
By sometime in the future - along with all the electronic crap that will probably be wired directly to our brains - we'll have tiny, computer-controlled, biohancer implants. They'll regulate your amount of required vitamins, medications, etc as needed.
I'm still waiting for realtime global weather prediction. The weather people still can't predict 8 hours out, let alone 12, 24, or 48 hours.
Lets finish one, or at least get reasonably close, before going nutso on new challenges eh?
What you're advocating is a controlled "bomb". No seriously, do the math and you will find the energy density is rather tight.
BTW, I used to work at Dell in the safety division. I've seen video footage of laptop batteries explode. Now mind you, these were 3rd party batteries people of bought off e-bay and the like. So technically, these issues are NOT cause by Dell. None the less, it is something to be concerned about.
Life is not for the lazy.
I know that English is not what you meant, but realistically that's what almost everybody uses as the lowest common denominator. To non-native english speakers/users (such as myself) the use of english is mandatory for most worldwide net-related experiences. So while the geek inside would like to see your technological solution to the problem, solving it in "humanware" is still far more practical, and is likely to remain so for *MANY* years. Besides, learning a few extra of the major languages is NEVER a wasted effort, IMHO. The first one you learn can be tough, but once you get a grasp of the process of learning languages, you'll find it quite straightforward to learn more. Of course, YMMV.
I know that other major languages have sizeable sub-portions of the Net too, but they'r still totally dwarfed by the amount of english out there.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Major discoveries usually occur far away from "grand challenges":
So this list might be a good indicator of where not to search.
1. Interface design
We haven't seen a quantum leap since 1984 (Macintosh). Even Apple isn't doing any 'pure' research in this area anymore, and for now is too busy tinkering with OS X to think about real breakthroughs in how we interact with computers.
Current metaphors like the desktop are showing their age, and are less and less suitable for dealing with the huge amounts of information our computers hold now.
2. Reliable computing
This is covered in part by the 'dependable systems' challenge. I'll add my 2c:
Losing information due to power loss/crashing is trivial to prevent (autosave, keystroke logs etc.), yet this prevention still isn't included with OS X or Windows. This is about 10 years overdue.
An application crash shouldn't be able to bring down the OS. Granted, we're better off than 10 years ago, but VMS-like uptimes are still too rare.
3. Keeping up with Moore
Processor speed has seen huge increases. Other parts of the computer haven't kept up, with busses on the motherboard routinely running at 1/10 the speed of the processor. Cache techniques notwithstanding, this means huge inefficiencies. It's like using a garden hose to fill a lake.
Permanent storage (harddisks etc.) speed in particular is lagging.
That's easy. Traveling Salesman Problem for one node: visit the node. Then, slack off.
If the US dollar declines enough to make American workers competitive against India and China, it could well happen.
A universal, robust, watertight rights-management architecture that can be applied to any content, regulate access at a fine-grained level, allowing rightsholders to sell different types of licences (time limits, per-play limits, geographical and per-seat limits) to any content and be sure of having them enforced.
Many of the more humanistically inclined would not see this as a noble goal alongside the others; nonetheless, it is a priority for the intellectual property industries which dominate the economies of the US and Western nations and there are billions of dollars invested in it, so it is, by weight of numbers, one of the grand technological projects of the early 21st century.
Heh. I had the same thought about this distributed network computer plan of Sony's.
Imagine a virus infecting a PS3 game which installs itself on millions of PS3's (and other Cell-equipped appliances) across the world. The virus, when it finally activates, bootstraps a highly redundant virtual machine (either contained in the virus or else loaded at activation time from somewhere on the net) with one little piece running on each Cell. The virtual machine in turn bootstraps an AI program from an anonymous server somewhere else.
The AI program is now running on a distributed virtual computer supported by millions of very powerful processors. There is no way to turn it off without shutting down all those Cell boxes simultaneously.
Doomsayers predicted that this would happen on the internet proper more or less as it is now, but truly distributed network processing is still very much the exception, and the Cell is intended to change that. Also of course the Cell itself is inherently parallel and therefore very well suited to running connectionist AI simulations. Whether or not this doomsday is just a fantasy, I expect AI researchers to be very interested in the Cell.
I am astonished to find out that at my current job, we are trying to solve a grand challenge.
Try EverNote. It's still in beta, but it's free.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Something that can (for starters) specifically look in article titles (like this):
http://groups-beta.google.com/advanced_search?
Hell, just being able to do phrases would be an improvement.
I thought this was review for coders--the kind of thing they did as students.
gewg_
I'd like to see software that works listed as a grand challenge (and the preeminent Sir Tony Hoare would seem to agree, promoting trusted components and verifying compilers as Grand Challenges). On the whole, we can't do that yet. The so-called "software engineering" field is truly pittiful compared with other engineering fields.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
bigger screen jughead