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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?"
True.. that's one thing they left off their list. Battery life hasn't increased at the rate as I'd like it to. Id would be a beautiful thing if I only had to charge my PDA once/month, or my laptop could go a week without charging
I store my recipes online (the way nature intended)
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.
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!
Reverse IT outsourcing and get IT jobs for Americans. No greater challenge than that.
A computer system that will pass the Turing Test.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Mobile power (batteries) is the only thing restricting us from having amazing portable machines. Lion tech is getting old and unable to power our society. With processor speeds reaching 4ghz soon, the battery "industry" is lagging way behind. Hell, we had like 386's when Lithium ion came out.
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.
Too bad for the macromedia fanboys that the answer to your problem is called "SVG+XML+Xforms".
Relax. It's widely acknowledged that this place is infested by MS supporters and, most likely, employees.
These days, if you make an anti-Windows comment, you'll get modded down. If you make an anti-religious or anti-Republican comment, you'll get similar results.
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!)
I think the wording in the article is misleading. The term "verifying compiler" usually refers to a compiler that can offer some proof that the translation it does is correct--i.e. that the object code it produces implements the source code specification. If the abstract transformations your compiler does are proven correct, then your compiler can automatically prove (or generate a proof of) the correctness of a specific translation it does.
Of couse, there is no program that automatically decides whether a program satisfies certain properties or not (Halting Problem).
(That is, a good enough atomic-level brain/body simulation would still respond "don't remind me" when asked about it's last birthday, just like the human being being simulated.)
Whether anybody was home would be one for the philosophers, but such a simulation, of say a computer researcher, could work, and earn money just as well as it's original. So capitalism would pursue it. And it will rise in speed with hardware advances (which will increase correspondingly). So FOOM!
It doesn't matter which ape activates the Monolith
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
I think it *is* software based. We don't really all of the mechanisms that cause synapse formation or alteration, and I saw some research last year that suggested that synapses and neurons may not be the entire answer to the brains computational power. There were some cells thought to be support cells that have shown indications of communication with eachother and neurons.
When someone says brute force, I take it to mean a simulation at near molecular level, so that we don't necessarily have to know *how* it works, as long as we have all of the right components, it will just work. Careful tracing of the operation would then lead to insights about how real brains work. This, of course, would require a great deal of computing power.
Play Command HQ online
Of course, many of these proposed filesystems allow for something like, "Give me all my jpg's that are larger than 640x480 and were created later than Jan 1st." So, already, we have more than keywords.
However, I still don't think it's sufficient. If I have thousands of photos, is it really reasonable to expect that I am going to be comprehensive about adding keywords to each? I mean, enough keywords for each photo that I can say, "Find that picture I took of the waterfall and a woman swimming underneath"? GIS can do this somewhat, but only because it's pulling metadata from the pages that link to the photo, and even then, it's not really reliable enough.
Our big hope, I think, is that it will be possible for pictures to be automatically analyzed for content. So, as a simple example, the computer might be able to tell the difference between a portrait and a landscape. Between a child and adult? A man and a woman? How far can we go with this?
Will computers be able to search music by whether it will get you pumped up or whether it will sooth you? Whether it *sounds* fast or slow? Will I be able to set my iTunes smart playlist to find me 50 "sad" songs out of my library?
I think this is the way things need to go, but it's certainly a "grand challenge" to get these sorts of capabilities working properly in consumer-level computers.
We also can't write a program that verifies whether or not a given theorem in a sufficiently powerful formal system is true. This doesn't seem to stop us from doing math, or even writing theorem provers.
There are many, many programs about which we can programmatically verify generally undecidable properties. And if we can't for a given input, we can either disallow it as input, recognize it and give up, or just let our program loop merrily. In fact, I would be surprised if there is a real-world program out there now or in the future that can't written so that it can be be verified to halt or not. Has anybody been stopped from necessary computation by Post's Correspondence Problem? Doubtful.
There is a whole field of creating these types of compilers known as Proof Carrying Code. The idea is that a user specifies a security policy detailing what properties a program needs (halts, memory-safe), then a compiler automatically supplies and bundles with the code a proof if one exists, which is then verified before the program is run. This is real technology that works on large classes of real programs.
Only 3X ? try 100X.
A world with 100M people on it would be sustainable and comfortable for anyone, given today's acquired technology and capabilities.
Anything above that is not.