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Monday, February 07, 2005

IBM, Sony, Toshiba to reveal superbrain chip

IBM, Sony, Toshiba to reveal superbrain chip

Interesting development ... a plus for pervasive computing, the challenge is still up for the software developers to produce the algorithms ... This kind of hardware development always reminds me of my attendance at the ACM awards for the IBM Deep Blue - chess playing system in 1997. To their credit, IBM gave the cash award to the programmers involved. One of the IBM recipients (sorry, have forgotten his name) made a point of saying that the approach was not 'smart' but rather 'clever brute force' ... That very honest statement made me smile. I recall the ACM folks being a bit taken aback by this, a bit embarrassed that they had not sponsored the emergence of intelligence in software. If the chips keep getting smaller and faster, will everything ultimately be solved by brute force? Its a bit like the prevalence of of search on the web today, its the easy way out. Or like the prevalence of blogs over wikis ... they are also the easy way to develop content. Although I see why its being done, is it preventing some deep thought about algorithms? Don't get me wrong, there is lots of work progressing on smarts, but I wonder if more can be done.

1 comment:

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