Book of the Black Dog

If you haven't heard of Moore's law, don't worry a lot of people haven't. But essentially it is this: that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented and that this trend will continue for the foreseeable future.

For the most part this is true, and was covered in Ray Kurzweil's book "The Singularity is N"ear, that technology doesn't progress arthemtically, but exponentially. So turning this to the computer chip, do we run up against the physics wall and have Moore's law fall on it's but? Nope, Intell says that they can continue to keep packing circuts smaller into chips.

So what's the problem? It's not capacity, but speed. A few years ago microprocessors reached 3GHz. You can't make them faster, or they overheat and start to melt. To solve that problem, we began making chips that do several tasks at once, instead of doing a single thing faster and faster. These days we're seeing dual-core and quad-core chips—in essence, processors with two or four tiny computer engines on a single chip. Within a decade we will likely see chips with 100 cores.

So what's the problem? Us apparently. The operating systems aren't set up for it. Neither are the programming languages and development tools. Writing programs for them is incredibly difficult and time--consuming. The challenge now is to make it possible—and cheap—for ordinary programmers to write programs that run in parallel.

So apparently we are needing that computer savant who is able to make that cognitive leap and program holographicly, and think past linear program mindset to boost our buts toward quantum computing.

This is a TED talk by Pattie Maes, who runs a lab at MIT, presented the “6th Sense” system. It’s mostly the work of one of her students, Pranav Mistry. Pattie claims that nothing shown is customized. By using a lanyard system with bobbles clipped to it they’ve managed to make a system that doesn’t incite peels of laughter in general public. Oh, and it is affordable (sub-$300 in its current state, doubtless to come down if its massed produced). Its a fulfillment of practical “smart” apparel. It looks very very doable. The talk is about 8 minutes long. Check it out.