[Vo]:New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations
The esteemed Mr. Jones might enjoy this article: SUBJECT: New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations By: Louisa Hearn February 26, 2008 http://www.theage.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl? path=/articles/2008/02/26/1203788327976.html http://tinyurl.com/2vbc87 What makes the gaming console vastly superior to high-end computers for complex research algorithms, Mr Khanna says, is the Cell chip built by IBM to facilitate high-end gaming functions on the latest generation of consoles. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations
Interesting analog observation Jones, I had never connected this thought when observing the laws of human nature, ( alive and well in the Dime Box saloon).Public education provides and equally valid example of the law governing cultures which allow that when mixing cultures, the most base culture will drag every other culture down to it's base as demonstrated by USA public education experiments. It is often proposed that ancient Greece culture was destroyed from within. The city of Ephesus offers a clue to what really happens when a culture like the Greek is invaded by a most evil and debased culture that totally corrupted the higher ideals taught in Greece. We can anticipate the next generation of computer technology to validate the result of a combination of shifts in society. Everything predicted by Alvin Toffler has already come and gone when he predicted that a culture will rise that produces a religion of demanding constant change vs the time held desire of past generations to cling to traditions. When the concept of money has been reconceptualized as revealed by Don Rumsfeld remark that deficits no longer matter, we may begin to better understand a new economic model is being tested on the world. These future shock events now taking place are only preludes. Richard Jones wrote, The very best human brain is 'around' the equivalent of 1-10 teraflops although admittedly this is an impossible comparison to make valid- since the brain is analog not digital.
[Vo]:Took 16 Months, But Google Relaunches Jotspot
Jed, Is this the alternative wiki project you were keeping an eye on, or another variation? http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/02/27/it-took-16-months-but-google-relaunches-jotspot/ Looks interesting. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
Re: [Vo]:New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations
Steve, Don't know if you caught the full impact of the double paradigm shift which is looming on the immediate horizon, and which is hinted at the end of this piece. Probably not to the extent which is verbalized below, since as usual, I am reading-in more information (and personal expectation) than was likey intended by the writer; but anyway, there is appearing (once again) the signs and reverberations of what looks to me like the start of a quantum leap in the evolution of ... hmm ... well, not just the evolution of computers, which Moore's Law is taking care of, but in the evolution of (who/what) will become the dominant thinker on Terra ...and eventually maybe even the dominant species. That would be assuming that the dominant-thinker becomes the dominant-species over time. [SIDE NOTE] In truth, at least in the short history of evolution on earth, it has been the dominant predator which becomes the dominant species; and in the case of 'homo sapiens', being able to use logic and thinking has helped greatly in that quest for domination - but most apparently, the details of that help has been in the design and building of, among other things, superior killing machines ;-( Anyway, after that long-winded preamble, here is the quote from the article which portends a double paradigm shift with Darwinian consequences: Of course 'it' [the ultra-computer based on cheap gaming machines] does cost less, but what needs to be recognized is that it also changes the way people think about problems when they are given a hundred times more computer power. Paradigm shift #1 is reaching the 'tipping point' of raw affordability (MIPS/$) in the hardware. This is what can be called the 'son of x-box' where within 2-4 years (if Moore's Law holds) we will have reached the $100/teraflop level in raw processing power. The very best human brain is 'around' the equivalent of 1-10 teraflops although admittedly this is an impossible comparison to make valid- since the brain is analog not digital. With 'proper software', many experts suspect a 10 teraflop computer will become fully 'verbal' and equal to humans in most respects and far superior in others beyond that is anybody's guess. (there is not enough space time here to counter the Penrose objections to that conclusion. Anyway, back to the unexpected and final step in linked paradigm shifts: So rather than taking the thing apart you just start moving all the knobs about to see what happens when you change something - just as you might in real life Paradigm shift #2, however, goes beyond this (which is a bit short-sighted) and is found in reaching another tipping point of NOT necessarily needing knobs, or human programmers, but instead you just step aside That is, you instead of requiring software to utilize that affordable hardware, someone will just give the machine a few basic rules and logic, stand back, plug it in and let it learn and self-educate itself from any and all accessible information resources (mainly the www, of course). Of course you have to teach it to discriminate, weed out the BS and minimize the disinformation and SPAM which is overwhelming the net these days ;-} We are not that far away from this scenario, and yet almost no one outside of the field of AI is aware of the ultimate ramifications of allowing this kind of evolutionary jump to continue at its present pace. Except Sci-Fi writers and assorted Vorticians, of course. Jones --- OrionWorks [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The esteemed Mr. Jones might enjoy this article: SUBJECT: New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations By: Louisa Hearn February 26, 2008 http://www.theage.com.au/cgi-bin/common/popupPrintArticle.pl? path=/articles/2008/02/26/1203788327976.html http://tinyurl.com/2vbc87 What makes the gaming console vastly superior to high-end computers for complex research algorithms, Mr Khanna says, is the Cell chip built by IBM to facilitate high-end gaming functions on the latest generation of consoles. Regards Steven Vincent Johnson www.OrionWorks.com www.zazzle.com/orionworks
[Vo]:Scientific Journals International
See: http://www.scientificjournals.org/ Some quotes from the Home page: SJI publishes more than 100 peer-reviewed open-access journals for all disciplines. SJI has assembled a prestigious Editorial and Advisory Board representing scholars from Yale, Oxford, Harvard, Cambridge and hundreds of universities from around the world. SJI maintains a rapid turnaround from submission to publication, averaging 30 to 60 days. . . . SJI is pioneering a new vision for scholarly publishing. All traditional journals have very restrictive stylistic policies that unduly create artificial barriers and in effect retard innovation and creativity. SJI is dedicated to establishing a new paradigm for academic publishing. . . . The Open-Access Movement In light of declarations supporting open access to research literature from international bodies including the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) . . . , many scholars now believe that open-access publishing is the wave of the future. The open-access concept shifts the funding from the point of access or subscription fees to the point of dissemination or processing fees. During the past few years, the rising cost of research journals has forced many individuals and institutions to cancel their subscriptions. . . . [This] creates barriers for the scientific community from scholarly interaction and access. Consequently, access to scientific knowledge has gone into a state of decline in recent years. Suppression of New Ideas Innovation Human history is riddled with examples of innovations and research that had been suppressed and derogated by the leading science community and the accepted scientific conventions of the time. Throughout human history, many innovators became the victims of the insults of the skeptical scientific, governmental and corporate power elites. Many scientists and scholars know that disagreeing with the dominant view is risky, especially when that view is backed by powerful interest groups. . . . Amen. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations
- Original Message - From: R C Macaulay [EMAIL PROTECTED] snip Jones wrote, The very best human brain is 'around' the equivalent of 1-10 teraflops although admittedly this is an impossible comparison to make valid- since the brain is analog not digital. Animal brains are neither analog or digital; they are a blend of both and are non-algorithmic. Comparisons with algorithmic computers are misleading at best. Arguably the salient property of brains is pattern recognition, which is central to the perceptual systems; it is poorly done by algoritmic machines. Penrose in his Shadows of the Mind pointed out that there are problems which human minds can solve which have no *algorithmic* solutions. Neurones can have hundreds of synapses connecting other neurones. The synapses are binary in their action but the threshold is influenced by many 'analog' factors including the chemical environment. The possible number of patterns of activated neurones is beyond astronomical in number. I think it very adventurous to state what this entitiy can or cannot do; this is perhaps the interface between 'science' and 'religion'. IBM is building a massively parallel computer to emulate an anatomical feature of the neocortex. We may find that it cannot be programmed but it can learn -- and we know how predictable[?] is the outcome of teaching a human child. Mike Carrell This Email has been scanned for all viruses by Medford Leas I.T. Department.
[Vo]:OT: New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations
This is getting seriously off-topic for alternative energy (or maybe not!)... But a techno-Geek Vortician sent me info about the availability NOW of teraflop desktop supercomputers and servers. If you have the buck$ for a parked Beamer, say, but would rather have a 24/7 internet screamer, go for it! Actually the price of entry into terabyte computing has dropped in the past 4 years from $25 million(minimum) to less than $5,000, and will likely continue to exceed Moore's Law for a while. Nevertheless, any of us can still afford to wait a few years, since the best use would be full speech recognition with parsing (as opposed to voice-to-text only) and this is not ready yet. A few months ago, NVIDIA, a company noted for graphics processing, not CPUs - figured out a way to combine multithreaded parallel graphics chips to do some incredibly powerful and versatile computing- of the very same kind which the human brain also does best. Their well-named Tesla processors can be linked together as blade servers. The Tesla S870, has a retail price of $12,000, and will be packed with four x8 series GPUs and will do 500 gigaflops per GPU. With this server, you get 2 teraflops for not all that much, but in two years, when the novelty has worn off, look for the same thing for under $2,500. Marvin Minsky, at one time claimed that the human brain is a one teraflop-equivalent analog computer, but he caught so much flak from Roger Penrose and others, that he raised his estimate (so as not to be too embarrassing to humans?). Something similar happened when the horsepower was designated as a comparative unit. I copied a Wiki entry on James Watt and the naming of the HP below, mainly for its historical value to word-phreaks. However, I agree with those in AI who opine that a doctorate level of human brain-power will likely require 10 teraflops, once the necessary software is available. This fall, a graphics card for any computer, called the Tesla C870 will cranks out 500 gigaflops will sell for $1499. But as we all continue to lament (especially those of us with deficient typing and spelling skills), the best use for this kind of computing power, outside of acedemia, would be to dispense with the keyboard altogether; yet speech, or even accurate voice recognition, is not perfected, and parsing the words into true actionable meaning is even further away. Jones History of the horsepower (paraphrased from Wiki) ... straight from the 'horse's mouth', so to speak. The term horsepower was coined by James Watt to help market his improved steam engine. He had previously agreed to take royalties of one third of the savings in coal for this engine, but that scheme did not work with customers who used horses instead. Watt determined that a horse could turn a mill wheel 144 times in an hour. The wheel was 12 feet in radius, therefore the horse travelled 2.4 × 2#960; × 12 feet in one minute. Watt judged that the horse could pull with a force of 180 pounds. This all was rounded to 33,000 ft·lbf/min. Engineering in History recounts that Smeaton estimated that an average horse could produce 22,916-foot-pounds per minute over time. Desaguliers increased that number, but Watt standardized the figure at 33,000. Put into perspective, a healthy human can produce about 1.2 hp briefly, in a sprint - and sustain about 0.1 hp indefinitely; and trained athletes can manage up to about 0.3 horsepower for a period of several hours. Most observers familiar with horses estimate that Watt was intentionally optimistic and wanted to over deliver with his replacement; and that few horses can maintain the one HP effort for long. Regardless, comparisons of machines to horses proved to be an enduring marketing tool.
Re: [Vo]:OT: New supercomputer is a rack of PlayStations
Jones Beene wrote: Actually the price of entry into terabyte computing has dropped in the past 4 years from $25 million(minimum) to less than $5,000, and will likely continue to exceed Moore's Law for a while. I believe that is because recent breakthroughs are mainly in massively parallel processing (MPP) software, rather than hardware. Hardware is dependent on Moore's law, but software is not. MPP software was very difficult to develop and it lagged for many years, so you might say progress was held back and it is now catching up. Google has made the largest contribution to this software. Their equipment in the aggregate constitutes the world's largest MPP supercomputer. When you look back at the grand early supercomputers such as Illiac, it is kind of a letdown to realize that the world's most impressive computer today is held together with Velcro, and used mainly for advertising. - Jed
Re: [Vo]:Nelson Ying back in the news
--- Jed Rothwell wrote: This is weird: http://www.wesh.com/education/15418063/detail.html Speaking of weirdness and Nelson Ying in the same breath, check this one out: http://members.aol.com/balquhain/Magic.html YUP! - this character Ying, cold-fusion genius extraordinaire (by his own admission) is also the BARON OF BALQUHAIN a real Scottish baronage (apparently). ... maybe the field of LENR is a magnet for, shall we say, the weirdest of the weird ... ... present company excluded, of course ;-) Jones
