My latest article, “Are You Smarter Than a Sixth-Generation Computer?” leads off this month’s issue of The Futurist magazine. (Sept/Oct 2012) The article explores the need for a standard metric for AIs and is based on my paper, “Toward a Standard Metric of Machine Intelligence”, which I recently published in […]
Nine months ago, I wrote a post called “The Supercomputer Race” about China’s then top-ranked supercomputer, the Tianhe-1A and what it meant for the U.S. The Tianhe-1A achieved 2.57 petafolps (1015 floating point operations per second) on LINPACK, a benchmark based on a series of complex linear equations. In comparison, […]
The last few years finally saw the arrival of supercomputers capable of petascale performance. In all, seven systems from the US, China, Japan and France achieved the milestone of processing a million billion floating point operations per second (flops) by the end of 2010. But even before this target was […]
I consider myself a techno-optimist, but Watson’s performance in Jeopardy’s IBM Challenge has definitely exceeded my expectations. While I did predict Watson would win the competition, I didn’t think it would be so dominant. This was a contest I thought machine intelligence might win by a narrow margin, but the […]
On January 13, 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer competed in a practice round of Jeopardy, the long-running trivia quiz show. Playing against the program’s two most successful champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, Watson won the preliminary match. Is this all a big publicity stunt? Of course it is. But it […]
Recent reports that China is barreling ahead in its development of supercomputers should give the U.S. considerable cause for concern. China has devoted significant resources to their supercomputer program in recent years, resulting in their ranking earlier this year at the number two spot on the TOP500 list. TOP500.org ranks […]