The AI is actually named HAL.

I don't think that the solution to the problem has anything to do with what language is used to solve the problem. From the article:

"The software suite tests them using computational fluid dynamics, which make heavy use of complicated mathematical formulae and data structures to see how well the designs work."

When I was an undergraduate I wrote a FORTRAN program for a genetics professor to calculate the distribution of butterfly markings in a wild butterfly population (I also caught butterflies, tagged them, recording their markings, and released them). The statistical problem was solved by solving partial differential equations by approximation. The equation had two complicated halves. I guessed a number to be the solution and then plugged it into both sides of the equation getting two different answers. I then plugged the difference of the two answers into another equation which gave me a guess as to where the final answer lay. I plugged the difference equation result into the first two equations and came up with a new narrower answer spread. I kept doing this loop until the difference result was less than the number of significant digits I wanted in the answer. This program was a real CPU burner, enough so that Dr. West had to have a serious discussion with the computer center about his computer budget.

Years later I was the manager of a mainframe computer center. I once toured the much larger McDonald Douglas computer center in St Louis to see what I could learn about managing a computer center. One of the large applications at McDonald Douglas was solving partial differential equations by approximation to measure airflow across a wing. Each cross section on a wing had a different answer so the more cross sections they solved the more accurate their answer was. Therefore they divided up the problem across several computers and ran several calculations in parallel.

I think that the problem described by NASA is similar to my population genetics problem or McDonald Douglas' wing air flow problem. I can easily see that by cutting down the number of iterations needed to arrive at a significant answer you can save large amounts of CPU time. From the article:

"Significant improvements could be gained just by simplifying a heavily used sub-routine so it runs a few milliseconds faster, said Nasa on the webpage describing the competition. If the routine is called millions of times during a simulation this could "significantly" trim testing times, it added."

So if I were working on the problem I would look for an answer by speeding up the approximation calculation rather than speeding up the hardware or programming language.

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Steve Stites

The article does not mention what I consider to be the most obvious solution to the problem of old COBOL programmers dying off. Businesses with a COBOL maintenance problem should train young people how to program in COBOL. The businesses will need such people even if they plan to convert their code base to a different language as such a conversion would take years to implement.. --------- Steve Stites

Usually when a system problem becomes a long playing catastrophe it is because there is either no backup or the backup is not restorable. ---------------- Steve Stites

Then your name is Ponzi.

Steve Stites