"In this article, see how HAL 9000, the computer in the 2001: A Space Odyssey movie [ed. note: for you cultural barbarians: that's from (one of) the best director(s) ever], the smartest believable artificial intelligence so far in fiction, could predict equipment failure, answer personal questions, learn to sing 'Bicycle built for Two', and go insane, based on IBM Build to Manage Toolkit components. By the end of this article, you'll see how autonomic computing can be implemented today; determine if there is such a thing as a Hofstadter-Moebius loop in programming; and discover if HAL stands for Heuristic ALgorithmic computer, Heuristic Autonomic Learner, or is simply the first three letters of a prankster holiday that occurs about this time of the year."
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Member since:2005-07-06
"perhaps the hardware we have is not really suitable to build such software."
Well, for instance hardware 64bit support has been available for quite a while, and it is getting better very fast. But I don't see many 64bit apps.
Even less I see apps which can take advantage of 4 or more CPU cores.
Member since:2005-07-08
This sort of gets back to my thesis, hardware currently has a Memory Wall that continues to grow, that makes software that manipulates large data sets run much slower with all those cache & TLB misses. I'd bet the kind of app that would simulate HAL would have an enormouse working set of maybe 100s gigabytes of "distributed knowledge" (what else does 10^10 neurons do). What the current crop of cpus are good at is running media codecs and the like that does alot of DSP on small tiles of pixel data. I am sure knowledge software is the complete inverse of that.
A 64 bit address aspace should help on the size of the knowledge base but the Memory Wall esp to hard disk stops the software from connecting it all up. I bet that distributed multiprocessors on a chip with real support for concurrency will be much better suited for AI software. Years ago Transputers produced lots of AI conference papers.
Member since:
2005-07-08
Yes we are in persistant PC infancy.
The no-keyboard-mice OS with natural voice language face & gesture communications could run on top of any OS out there, you really wouldn't want it to deal with hardware so it would look like an app that consumes all resources.
On a joking note we already have the self heaTing capabilities..
The hardware is willing but I don't see any software on the horizon, perhaps the hardware we have is not really suitable to build such software.