At this year's CASCON, I spoke to Murray Campbell from IBM. He's one of the lead people who work on this project and who also worked on Deep Blue. I discussed this with him. My girlfriend had told me that she also had no difficulty beating the online demo. He answered that the online demo is only a part of the system, and that their full system routinely beats top Jeopardy players. They're going to showcase their system on TV because they truly believe it has a chance at winning.

Unrelated to this, I also learned that Deep Blue had custom processors engineered and fabricated (VLSI) just to be chess accelerators. Prior to this, I always thought the machine was a relatively powerful supercomputer (with general purpose hardware) running their custom chess software. It turns out that it had many blades of processors dedicated to searching positions really fast, which each even contained libraries of chess opening moves engraved in ROM.

>> Observing real-world behavior will teach you alot more about human nature...

You have me confused with my younger sister, LUH 3417.

Common misconception. Too big can be very cumbersome and frustrating. When you get down to it, it's all about effectiveness and sleekness, you see. I think women spot one they find attractive, try it for a bit, and if their experience is pleasant, they'll stick with it. I think women (and quite a few men) like simplicity, that they want something that can adapt to them, not the other way around, and I think Steve Jobs has that figured out pretty well.

Despite what you think you might have learned from all those edutainment movies. Observing real-world behavior will teach you alot more about human nature...

It's not a question of cheating. Those algorithms are simply approximate. They can't be guaranteed to get the optimal solution, but only to get a solution that is within some factor as good as the optimal... Or sometimes give no guarantees at all (e.g.: genetic algorithms). Those are often the solutions used in practice for NP-complete problems, because they're fast and will often get you very very close to the optimal solution. So close that you don't really care it isn't guaranteed optimal. Methods such as genetic algorithms or simulated annealing work by sampling the space of possible solutions and performing random mutations on the better solutions that are found in an attempt to get even better solutions.

I agree. Education takes so long. I'm currently working on a Ph.D. I'll probably be done around 28. I wish I had more time, so I could take things a little slower, enjoy my life more, and also spend even more time learnings about other topics. The perspective of growing old doesn't bring me any comfort. It's just something we all have had to resign ourselves to, thus far... But I honestly would love to have the opportunity to have 4-5 different careers in my life, to try alot of different possibilities, without having to feel any kind of rush.

Clearly, from the other comments, alot of people see it as wrong and unnatural for people to live indefinitely, because it's never been achieved. It would be a radical change. I honestly think, though, that if we could find a way to keep people young indefinitely, to keep both our bodies and our brains from aging, it might be a good thing. It might indeed imply that we would have to enforce population control, to avoid a population explosion, but is that so bad? It means less children to take care of, which means those children might be better taken care of. It also probably means more educated people, more experts in all fields, lower crime rates, etc. Not to mention... If people are young forever, it means no more old folks to care care of. Society suddenly has a bigger supply of able workers available.

If you're worried about changing the "natural order of things", then I say, we've already done that, as a species. We have the power to use our intelligence to improve our living conditions. Should we really refrain from doing so? Do you really think it's best for us to simply breed more and more children forever? If we have the power to prevent aging and greatly reduce fatality rates, should we really just do nothing, just so we can keep breeding more children? Should we just let people suffer and die because it's "natural"?

There is a programming model for FPGAs. They have their own programming languages which are widely used in the industry (Verilog/VHDL). This model isn't so different from the way OpenCL is used with GPUs. This kind of design will work well for some applications, where custom hardware accelerators can be precompiled and loaded on demand. There will already be demand for this. Some companies that can't afford to make ASICS will certainly like the idea of integrating their own decryption/routing/video accelerator into a chip for cheap, and be able to patch the hardware.

I would personally love to have a CPU that's coupled with an FPGA because it would allow things like implementing your own raytracing accelerator. You can even implement a whole custom CPU into an FPGA... To give you an idea of the flexibility, you can design your own custom memory controller, your own cache. Custom-design your own CPU with a hardware-accelerated garbage collector... The possibilities are boner inducing....

I don't know how much of a difference it will make for customers in the very near future, but for researchers, this will be an invaluable tool, and it might lead to insight on how to make good-ole regular processors (without FPGAs) better (hardware design research).

Current GPUs are only really useful for some tasks. Namely, code that doesn't do alot of branching (e.g.: matrix multiplication). The rest can't really gain that much performance. Not to mention, you have to manually upload and download data to the GPU, it's a total mess to program.

With an FPGA, you can generate on-the-fly a customized hardware accelerator for your problem domain. This could be a processor with specialized instruction for your problem domain, a vector processor, or even a hardware raytracing accelerator.. Whatever you need, so long as the FPGA has enough resources to encode it... And, it can potentially have access to the same memory bus as the CPU.

This won't beat a GPU at raw floating-point power, but it's just much much much more flexible in what it can do.

The benefit is that raytracing is a more natural way to do 3D rendering (by simulating light). It basically gives you a unified model of rendering. For programmers, this means almost every effect can be done very simply, and in a more physically realistic manner. Shiny surfaces, shadows, mirrors, are actually trivial to do with raytracing, but with current hardware (which performs rasterization), those effects are all hard to do, usually involving multiple rendering passes and dirty hacks. The end result is also less realistic. One problem that is *very hard* to tackle (I find) using rasterization, is real-time lighting, and again, it's very easy to do with raytracing.

Current efforts at real-time raytracing are limited because there isn't that much research into the topic, compared to the billions of R&D that went into rasterizing 3D accelerators. Lots of shiny surfaces is also a combination of poor artistic choices and trying too hard to demo the technical capabilities available. What I've seen involved either doing all the work on the CPU, or designing custom FPGAs to do hardware acceleration with a fraction of the computational power that a modern GPU has.

Still, in the long run, raytracing is *the way* to get the most realistic graphics possible. Raytracing is what's used by the the most realistic software rendering packages available today. Not saying you'll have graphics like these in real-time super soon, but it's worth looking forward to:

Rendered using VRay
Mental Ray
Mental Ray
VRay

It does seem likely that if a big part of your brain was reconstructed, you could have a different personality from before (with different degrees of change depending on the location and amount of damage). However, if I had to pick between that and being essentially disabled for life, I'd pick the personality change.

Having different personality traits could mean some of the people you know won't fully recognize you. It could likely mean losing some friends and/or a love partner, but then, so could having a significant memory or coordination problem (or any other major impairment, really). People can be very prejudiced and impatient.

>> My fiancee takes the stance that it's easier for men since we don't have to go through as much effort. Jewelry, shoes, bras, lingerie, worrying about safety and a host of other variables make it "easier" for men to date and catch a partner. When we started dating, I threw a bag in my truck and drove six hours to her house on a whim on her invite, if it hadn't worked out I'd have bailed to my buddy's house. Not that simple for a woman in her view.

I kind of feel like disagreeing with your fiancée there.

I'm a male-to-female transsexual... So I got to experience grooming myself both as a man and a woman. I can get dressed up in nice clothes, makeup, etc. in about an hour, less if I'm in a rush, and that's largely because I'm still not that good at makeup and it takes me a long time. So, I put in one hour of work, and I make heads turn, get whistled at, get hit on by tons of men at nightclubs. Arguably if I was better at makeup, I could do this in 30 mins. Putting on a bra, I can tell you, isn't very difficult. Jewelry? takes seconds to put on. Same thing for high heels. I don't find them very comfortable, but just t go out for an evening dancing, it's not a problem. I take a cab to and from the club, also mostly resolves the safety issue (and I don't usually go alone). Lingerie? I try to wear pretty underthings, but I think most men won't pick a girl based on whether or not she wears exotic lingerie in bed.

Now, grooming yourself as a man takes *some* time too. You also have to pick clothes you think are fashionable. You might also want to do something with your hair. Some men also wear jewelry. Not to mention, being considered a sexy woman is largely a matter of restricting the amount of food you eat. Being considered a sexy man (enough to distinguish yourself from the others) can require hours and hours working out at the gym. And then... Men often have to pay for women whenever doing an activity that requires paying, and do pretty demanding things for them. You just told us you drove *SIX HOURS* on a whim to date this girl? That means you were spending something around 33% of your awake time that day just for the privilege to see her, not to mention the gas. Do you think it took her more than an hour to make herself pretty?

In terms of dating, I think men clearly have to put in more effort. They are expected to do most of the courting, to pay for the girl, to come get her at home, to call her back, to compliment her, to think of interesting activities, etc. In terms of trying to just have casual sex with people, I think the asymmetry is even worse. Like I said, I'm a transsexual, so I have to be extra careful. When I go to nightclubs, I never leave with someone I didn't go to the club with. But, if I were a more anatomically standard girl, and I wanted to get laid with men, I could conceivably leave with a different guy each time, almost 100% success rate. I don't even think I'd have to spend more than an hour looking for someone. Guys? If they want to find a girl to get laid with at a nightclub, they have to come back over and over. I don't know what their success rate is, but it's probably no better than 25% of the time.

Call me a sexually frustrated nerd, but...

I very much agree. I think it's extremely common for women to be into 'bad boys'. Guys who seem confident because they don't seem to care very much about things. These same guys will end up irritating because when you're in a relationship with them, they'll treat you with the same level of caring they give to everything else: not much. I think another sad thing is that the guys who meet the 'bad boy' stereotype can be domineering and controlling. I suppose it makes alot of women tingle to see a man who seems to control the people who surround him (so powerful!), but do they really want that guy to try to control them too?

When I hear a woman say that "all men are the same, they're all jerks", it makes me sad. Quite possibly, all the men you dated were jerks, but then, you wouldn't have that problem if you stopped only picking jerks. If you gave a chance to one of the many many decent, honest, respectful men out there (and they exist), you might be pleasantly surprised.

Perhaps it's in part because the guys who simply don't care are the ones who ask girls out the most and we nerds don't do it nearly as much... But, in the end, it's the women who pick the people they're dating. They're the ones who say yes or no. If you're a girl and you want a decent man for a relationship, my advice would be to be more selective in the ways that matter. Men who aren't respectful and trustworthy will quickly show their true colors, if you observe carefully enough.

Distributing free content is free, but, unless I'm mistaken, that doesn't mean it's free to ship products that implement the codec.

I don't get why intel would buy a software company in the first place, much less one that makes not-so-great antivirus software. Seems to me they should have put that huge wad of cash into R&D.

Okay so, his argument makes very little sense. The way he comes up with a number of lines of code is terrible handwaving. He also doesn't seem to understand that the genome isn't a direct encoding of the brain, but rather a very complex and convoluted encoding of how to build a whole human being, keep it alive, and grow it to adulthood. It probably isn't the case that we will reverse engineer the human brain from its genome, and if it is, it certainly won't happen in 10 years.

However... Neuroscientists have already began reverse engineering the brain with the tools they have, which largely involves probing around animal brains with electrodes and seeing the response of various neurons to precisely calibrated stimuli. We seem to have a pretty good understanding of what happens in the first layers of the visual cortex, and the transformations that are applied on the visual input seem fairly straightforward to understand. It seems that we could encode what these first layers perform in terms of convolutional transformations in less than a page of programming code.... We might actually be able to simulate a significant part of the human visual cortex (hundreds of millions of neurons) in real-time using simple DSP chips.

In my opinion, it perhaps isn't so unlikely that other parts of our brains have a very regular structure, as these first layers of the visual cortex do, and so simulating what the human brain does in terms of computation might not take all that much code or as much CPU power as people imagine it would. It's possibly already achievable using the computational power of a medium-sized computer cluster any university can afford, or by designing specialized hardware.

Unfortunately, it seems that neuroscientists are very limited by the tools they have. Studying the early visual cortex using electrodes seems viable, because we can conceive of the simple convolutional transformations that occur easily, and map receptive fields using these simple tools. However, when it comes to analyzing the behavior of the neocortex, it seems quite difficult to quantify thoughts and reasoning using electrodes. It seems that, in a way, neuroscientists could do a much better job if they were able to map the connectivity of the brain first, and study its behavior using simulations. But so far, they have been deducing the connectivity by studying the behavior of different cells... So it becomes somewhat of a chicken and egg problem.

>> Hell? The thought of being able to watch my favorite movies over and over "for the fist time" sounds pretty good to me.

Yeah... If you are still capable of even understanding what's going on in the said movies. Alzheimers heavily damages short term memory, as far as I know.

Here in Canada, it seems like euthanasia will be legalized soon. This could enable people to choose ahead of time to be terminated if things get very bad. Right now, people who suffer the torture of debilitating illnesses don't even have that legal option. They have to suffer it through to the end and bring their family along, whether they want that or not.

I haven't had to go through this myself, but other people have told me they have seen their great grandparents go through it... To the point where these people became senile, then unable to walk, unable to talk, blind, and eventually starved to death. I think we should allow people to decide whether or not they want to finish their life that way.