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Looking Back at 1984 Report On "Radical Computing"
An anonymous reader writes "The Department of Defense has just released a long restricted report (PDF) by the JASON group entitled Radical Computing. This 1984 study outlines a number of alternate computing methods that could 'result in a radical improvement in computing.' The study attempts to explain the paradox of how the Russian lag in developing VLSI chips curiously did not critically hinder their accomplishments in space missions, ICBMs and chess computation. The authors speculate that the Russians might have achieved breakthroughs in alternative computing methods such as residue arithmetic and symbolic computing. (More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)"
"The paper, published by the Government Attic website, also mentions how, eventually, highly parallel computers could make use of these alternative computational methods. Also discussed are such things as functional programming, interval arithmetic, recursive machines, multiple processor concurrency, fast recurrence evaluation, DDA machines, data-flow, and hyper-column cortex model. Which of these ideas ever came to fruition?"
I' trying to remember who said this. But during the Cold War, the intelligence folks got so paranoid that they were attributing things and capabilities to the Russians that, after the Cold War ended, the Soviets were no where near having any sort of capability or had any sort of plans. One of the more well known over estimation was Soviet military capabilities. When the Cold War ended, the intelligence community couldn't believe how far off they were - most of there "insights" were over active imaginations.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
THIS is VLSI: http://www.mycpu.eu/ ...ahem...just not all in one chip.
For further reading, see Byte Magazine from April 1991. Surely all good /. readers have a copy somewhere?
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>... and symbolic computing.
The report states that MIR-2 had some symbolic computation capabilities the US seemed to have caught up with only slowly. Read the report, it's on page three.
This report shows that the US was driven by the competition with the USSR. Who knows, it probably helped push MACSYMA along and people had some incentive to make some impractical sounding products out of this, like the little known Mathematica or also Maple.
I'm beginning to think that the computing world became so boring lately mainly because the cold war is over. Just look at the table listing all those technologies on page 5. It doesn't mention Quantum computing alright, but things like the hypercolumn cortex model might finally materialize in form of the Blue Brain project. It could very well be, that this initiative was a driver for some computing projects that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
Je me souviens.
One of the main serious uses of computing, especially in the cold war, was solving partial differential equations. Whether these be for orbital calculations, stability analysis, EM simulation, etc..., solving partial differential equations is a critical part of any advanced engineering program.
The American approach really started in the 50s with the advent of programmable computers, and is very stereotypical: just find a decent approximation. Modern western engineering is all about using pretty advanced computers to find arbitrary numerical approximations to tricky PDEs. It's reached its culmination in modern engineering design, where most advanced products are designed and simulated in computers, and prototyping only occurs at the very end of the process.
The Soviets had computers.... some home built, some Western, but generally speaking they weren't very good. The Soviet approach was also very stereotypical: get an army of mathematicians and engineers to find exact analytic solutions to the problems you're trying to solve. You'd have armies of engineers and technicians designing things that in the west we'd give to a couple of engineers with some computer time.
The end result is that some Soviet engineering is stunningly brilliant. And a lot is absolute crap. One of the reasons the west won the cold war is that we were just much better at solving partial differential equations. This report is unsurprising... the Soviet approach just seems so stupid to any Western engineer unfamiliar with it, that you'd have to assume they had some magic trick up their sleeve. But nope, just a lot of brainpower misdirected into a lot of horribly inefficient pursuits.
I think it's safe to say they didn't have any exotic computer technology. Of course, hindsight is 20-20. ^.^
No? It's well known that the Soviets developed computers based on ternary logic (rather than binary) -- that seems pretty exotic to me. I thought it was equally well understood that it was more expedient to switch to clones of Western technology, so that's what happened.
Breakfast served all day!
This was deliberate misinformation by the US government, to justify defense spending, wars and a bunch of other stuff. And also, to scare people.
A lot of people are dismissing this report, but the ideas of residual arithmetic may in fact be plausible for things like GPUs, which are good at doing parallel computations and where the magnitude of the results are finite and known (two things the report mentions as making a problem suitable for residual arithmetic).
One thing which caught my eye is when they demonstrate how to evaluate polynomials using table look ups. It might be conceivable that things like ray/surface intersections in a ray-tracer, for example, could be represented by tables in a GPU specially built for ray-tracing. Without working through the math (which would be quite a chore), it certainly seems like a fairly plausible idea.
(More cynical types assume the Russians bought or stole US chips from the French or other too-helpful go-betweens.)
Back in the early '90s, one of my professors had come over from the USSR to teach Comp Sci. The local ACM chapter, at least a couple of times if not more, had him give a talk on the state of computing in Russia. This was exactly what he laid out. That shell companies were setup in France to lease IBM equipment (all you could do in those days for this very reason). The shell would fly-by-night the IBM to Russia where they would part it out. Notably, iirc, Romania was where they reverse engineered the machine code of the OS back into a somewhat usable assembly language. This, he would explain, was why all the really nasty viruses for PCs came from Romania - because the writers could eyeball instruction code and tell you what it was going to do. They also knew every crevice of the system, which became the advent of viruses hanging out in BIOS's and system clock memory.
He eventually became uncomfortable giving the talks and stopped, to my knowledge.
I worked in a college computer lab with a Russian expat
He was extremely familiar with DCL (Digital Command Language) and VAX architecture. Apparently, he had spent years working on DEC VAX clones in the old Soviet Union.
I also remember reading that DEC would etch stuff like "check six" in Russian onto integrated circuits to let the Russians know that they knew it was being reverse engineered
Wherever You Go, There You Are
Your post Sir, is a fine example of brainwash. Anybody with a bit of background in remote sensing can tell you that in the beginning of the 90s satellite pics with a resolution of about 0.5 metres could easily be bought on the market, coming from decommissioned Soviet-Union satellites. And them pics surely weren't sent to earth by canister either (that practice ended in the 60s, thank you very much).
I won't make any remark about your admiration of the precision bombing from the F-117 and the associated cost/effectiveness comparison (at least not until I've visited Iraq and Afghanistan), but really, using the Iraqi Army, after 12 years of embargo, as an example force in comparing the effectiveness of the US military versus the Warschau Pact?
What I do wonder about, really, is that after your headlong demonstration of the inferiority of Soviet material, you come to the next conclusion: "One lesson is that the technological capabilities of Chinese weaponry today shouldn't be underestimated." Underestimated?