"IBM starts work on computer to rival the human brain"

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

"THE first supercomputers to approach and even surpass the processing power of the human brain are to be built by IBM, under a £184 million contract announced by the US Government yesterday.

ASCI Purple and Blue Gene/L will be the fastest and most powerful machines built, with a combined capacity equal to the 500 best of today’s computers.

ASCI Purple, which will be built first and used to simulate nuclear tests, will be able to complete 100 thousand billion calculations per second — a speed known as 100 teraflops that some scientists say is comparable to the human brain."

2

I think that IBM should have called them “SkyNet” just to mess with peoples’ heads.

3

SkyNet does a teraflop. Yes … the end is nigh.

4

Could it be a coincidence that they make the announcement the same week that this makles the news?

5

But can it create a poem or paint a picture?

6

Well, going faster than my human brain today wouldn’t be difficult. I was trying to figure out how fast it was and got confused. Since it’s a UK article is that billions in the English usage?. As I understand it 100 thousand billion in UK would be 100,000,000,000,000,000 which would make it 100 petaflops unless it’s not UK terminology, or I don’t understant the conversion. Plus now as I reread it they are changing from “calculations per second” to ‘flops’ which is floating point operations per second, and not nessasarily the same as calculations per second, so pehaps it does work out after all.

Ah screw it, da dere ‘puter is powerful fast’.

7

You know, it’s funny, but I was under the impression that that’s what all the computer scientists have been trying to do all along. If that’s not the case, what’s the past 50 years of computer research been for? Making video games?

mmm… braaaaainnnnns…