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

Just ONE request...

[Thunderstruck]

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.

DATA DATA DATA

[Ars-Fartsica]

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.

Re:DATA DATA DATA

[nine-times]

I'll agree with this one. I look at my company's servers, and it seems like we just keep having to add more hard drives. Some of it's because people are disorganized, but sometimes people are disorganized because of the massive amounts of data that they're dealing with.

I have users with multi-GB mailboxes that can't quite be deleted, but archiving it doesn't really solve the problem either, it just makes it harder for the user to find what he's looking for.

So, it's a basic problem. Every day, we're generating more data. The amount of data (in bytes) is going up every day, as computers are more easily able to deal with higher resolution pictures and movies. But what do we do with all this data? Just keep writing it to tape and storing it in bunkers? After we accrue enough data, what's the point of keeping it?-- you won't be able to find anything anymore.

It's a real problem for me, both as an IT pro and personally. When dealing with so much data, how do you:

1. keep everything you want
2. make it easy to find what you want when you want it
3. make it easy to access what you want when you want it
4. throw away everything you aren't going to want

And how do you do all that with:

1. a solution a non-techie can deal with (grandma needs her data safe, too)
2. security from unauthorized access
3. security from data loss (off-site backups?)
4. an affordable price (both corporate and personal solutions)
5. without spending the amount of time on this that only an obsessive compulsive would consider acceptable

I haven't seen an acceptable solution yet.

Re:Brute force AI timeline

[divisionbyzero]

Of course, all of this assumes that human intelligence can be simulated by computation, in the classical sense. By simulation, I mean that a machine would demonstrate human-like intelligence. I don't think this is the case, but I don't see why we shouldn't pursue the brute force strategy, at least to rule it out. I don't really buy your guess on the number flops that would be necessary either, even if I assume that computation could simulate human-like intelligence. Every few years the number gets bumped up by an order of magnitude. If you look ten years ago, they were saying all we would need is 3 Tflops. Obviously, that's not true unless the problem is software-based. The real fundamental problem is that we do not even understand what intelligence is. It's hard to simulate something that you don't understand.

As for thought itself, I seriously doubt it works in the same way that a hardware simulation that you are describing would work. Think about how much energy would be required and how much heat would be generated compared to a human brain. Biology simply doesn't work in that way. Look at protein folding. It's extremely computationally intensive to determine the way a protein will fold, but biologically the process of folding is relatively simple. It's the same with thought. If we could figure out how the brain works, then we could probably simulate it with hardware that we could make now.