Silicon Mind
KurzweilAI had a huge news day yesterday. My "Winning A Nobel" post started with a Kurzweil link (late hattip). Kurzweil also pointed to an article on nanotech-enabled cancer therapy - and the fact that it's coming soon.
Then, side-by-side, Kurzweil reported on a project to simulate a mammalian brain, and then reported Japan's next effort to leap-frog the United States in supercomputer tech.
Japan is planning to build and have running by 2011 a computer that runs at 10 petaflops. If successful it will be 73 times faster than the current titleholder, IBM's Blue Gene.
In his new book, The Singularity Is Near, Kurzweil offers a range for the computing power of the human brain. The low end of this range happens to be 10 petaflops.
If I'm calculating this correctly, 10 petaflops is ten million times as powerful as today's best desktop machines.
[If you care to check my math, 10 petaflops is 1 followed by 16 zeros...flops. Desktop computers have a current top speed of 1 billion flops.]
My brain could be a petaflop short of 10 and I'd still see the obvious link between these two stories. IBM and EPFL (and others) are working on the software of the mind, and Japan is hard at work on the hardware. Will we have the equivalent of a human mind running on silicon sometime in the next decade?
Well, obviously both things - software and hardware - have to be working. And, they have to be working together. At present it doesn't appear that Japan plans to simulate the human mind with its new machine.
The ministry wants to use the planned supercomputer for a wider use such as simulating the formation of galaxy and the interactions between a medicine and the human body.
We don't ever know all the ways proposed computers will be used until we have them. If mind simulations prove fruitful, Japan might change its plans.
The U.S. is currently planning a petaflop-level computer by 2010. That's a year earlier, but only 1/10th the power. Maybe we should raise our sights.