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?"

Comments

Speaking of simulating life...

[rewt66]

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.

Re:Brute force AI timeline

[TimothyTimothyTimoth]

A deeper brute force simulation at the atomic level would be just a few more Tflops/years away. The problem of understanding at a "higher level" the thing that you are atomically scanning then modelling with basic physics is moot, especially if the full brain/body is simulated.

(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!