Five years ago, Ray Kurzweil predicted that we would see military aircraft the size of birds by the year 2009. Based on this article by Phil Carter, it would seem that Moore's Law seems to be moving faster.
AeroVironment's MicroAir Vehicle looks like a flying laptop with a propeller and is about the same size but carries a digital camera and can fly for nearly two hours. A slightly larger model is the Organic Air Vehicle, which uses a strong fan to keep itself aloft and can hover in place. In DARPA's vision of the future battlefield, unmanned aircraft like these will swarm the skies, providing ubiquitous surveillance for commanders.
Brother Ernie wonders how Apple can convince people that an iPod that can store thousands of songs should be filled at a cost of 99 cents per song.,
Something's got to give. I don't think that it will be digital storage in which advances continue to outpace Moore's Law. I don't think it will be people's expectations. Thus, it is going to have to be the ala carte pricing point. However, I think the only realistic ala carte pricing point is going to be in the micropayments realm, which is unlikely to work. Thus, a subscription-based model will be the only likely, voluntary solution.
Academic snobs do not think that anything written after 1800 is worth reading. At least, that is my impression of this list of books that university Presidents think should be read by undergraduates.
In retaliation, here is a list of recent books that I believe should be read by every undergraduate.
1.* The Age of Spiritual Machines, by Ray Kurzweil
2. The Diamond Age, by Neal Stephenson
3. The Transparent Society, by David Brin
4. Special Providence, by Walter Russell Mead
5. The Gathering Storm, by Winston Churchill
6. Reflections on the Great Depression, by Randall Parker
7. The Best and the Brightest, by David Halberstam
8. The Future and its Enemies, by Virginia Postrel
9. Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe
10. John Maynard Keynes: the Economist as Savior, by Robert Skidelsky (this is the second volume; both the first and the second are fascinating biographical literature)
I first saw the university Presidents' list referred to by Tyler Cowen.
*Update: Randall Parker (not the author of the book in my list) mentions The Blank Slate, by Stephen Pinker. How could I have overlooked that? It should be number one on my list, because it is such an excellent antidote to the nonsense that many college professors preach.
Mobile devices are about to become much more powerful, and storage is the reason. There have been three waves of evolution in portable storage, each of which has produced new product categories. The first development was affordable flash memory, allowing handhelds to carry hundreds of addresses and user-installed applications. That was enough to launch the PalmPilot, which created the market for personal digital assistants. The second wave was removable storage, using the Secure Digital, CompactFlash, or MemoryStick standards. Without the ability to pop data into and out of a device, we wouldn't have digital cameras. And the same basic technology, sealed into devices, powered the first generation of handheld MP3 music players. The third wave of portable storage was tiny hard drives, beginning with the 1.8 inch-wide Hitachi drives in Apple's iPod.
Very interesting observation. All through the eighties and most of the nineties, the storage improvements favored the personal computer. Moore's Law was a series of Christmas presents to Bill Gates.
But then when storage got really compressed, the focus shifted to mobile devices. And Microsoft has missed that. They missed the Internet, too, but they caught up with that pretty fast. I don't think they have a strategic vision for the mobile device revolution. I'm sure they think that they do, though.
Anyway, while I like the idea of mobile computing, and I certainly agree that new storage devices should make CD's obsolete, I am not as sold as Werbach is on the smaller form factors. I still like a real keyboard and a real screen. And then there's the issue of battery life, which doesn't seem to have a Moore's Law improvement factor.
Glenn Reynolds explains what is happening with digital storage capacity.
One of the big geek-news stories of last week was the release of LaCie's new 1 Terabyte external firewire hard drive. And it's easy to see why - a terabyte of storage in a package smaller than a cigar box, for about a thousand dollars is a pretty big deal.
...Twenty such one-terabyte disks, by way of comparison, would hold the entire Library of Congress, though you'd need 100 of them to hold all the pages on the Web
I have been saying that the CD is going to be killed by a combination of hard disks and downloads. The music industry is focused on the download part, but they really need to watch the hard disk trend.
You can now cram 2,000 hours of music—enough for around 120 versions of Wagner's “Ring” cycle—into a device the size of a deck of cards
Someone commented on this blog that the increased capacity of hard disks is not really Moore's Law. One can quibble over definitions, but the point is that the the ratio of storage capacity to physical volume and the ratio of storage capacity to price are both increasing at a Moore's-Law pace. That is why I think that CD's are headed toward obsolescence sooner than most people think.
Brad DeLong casually begins a post,
One side effect of having the text of 10,000 books from Project Gutenberg newly-downloaded onto your laptop
Jaron Lanier tries to get his arms around the issue of software scalability.
The reason we're stuck on temporal protocols is probably that information systems do meet our expectations when they are small. They only start to degrade as they grow....My engineering concern is to try to think about how to build large systems out of modules that don't suffer as terribly from protocol breakdown as existing designs do. The goal is to have all of the components in the system connect to each other by recognizing and interpreting each other as patterns rather than as followers of a protocol that is vulnerable to catastrophic failures.
This is certainly one of the most important issues in computing and software. As Frederick Brooks showed in his classic The Mythical Man-Month, the diminishing returns in software development are extreme. As you increase the number of people involved in a project, the productivity of each individual plummets.
Anyway, enough ranting. Go read Lanier's essay. It's important stuff. Also, scroll down when you get there, to Charles Simonyi's reply.
One of the people on the feedback forum for my essay on the Kasparov-X3D Fritz chess match pointed to a very helpful article from the Wikipedia.
Nalimov Endgame Tablebases, which use state of the art compression techniques, require 7.05 GB of hard disk space for all five-piece endings. It is estimated that to cover all the six-piece endings will require at least 1 Terabyte. Seven-piece tablebases are currently a long way off.
These are databases that cover endgames that can provably result in either a checkmate or a draw. I have a different suggestion.
Suppose that we define the objective to be not to obtain a provable win but to get the opponent to resign. For that purpose, you would want a database of positions in past high-level games in which one player resigned. When you evaluate a sequence of moves, you compare the end result to that database to see whether it leads to a position where the player would resign.
In choosing a move at, say, move 20, the computer would look ahead at a depth of, say, 20 moves, to move 40. Of all the moves to make at move 20, it chooses the one that leads to a position at move 40 that most closely resembles a position in which the opponent would resign, based on the characteristics derived from the database.
I assume that someone has tried that sort of thing.
I'm not much of a chess player, but like Aubrey de Grey, I used to play tournament Othello. Thus, I was interested in the latest man vs. machine chess match.
there is nothing unique about the way that computers defeat humans. The process by which computers beat humans is the same as the process by which superior humans beat inferior humans. Sometimes, the human loser feels like he "blew it," and sometimes he feels like he was "dead out of the opening." Either way, the better player wins. The better player wins by making fewer mistakes, where a mistake is any move that is less than optimal for the given situation.
Tyler Cowen has a good post on the forthcoming chess match between Gary Kasparov and computers. He concludes,
I know it is not as simple as Moore's Law, but hey, don't these machines improve their game more rapidly than the human players do?
In Othello, the humans had to adapt to the computers. Top Othello players spend a huge amount of time studying computer openings. It turns out that a lot of openings that humans think are unplayable are in fact decent openings if you know how to handle them.
Tyler Cowen's description of chess games in which the computer falls behind and then grinds out a win sounds familiar. But the same thing happens between two human players. In Othello, I was ahead in games against David Shaman or Brian Rose (two top U.S. players) much more often at move 30 than at the end. My estimate is that the best players make optimal moves about 75 percent of the time. If you make optimal moves only 65 percent of the time, you may get lucky for a while, but over the course of an entire game your chances of winning are slim.
In chess, I imagine that it's a similar story. The reason that you are more likely to be ahead of a superior player (computer or human) in the middle than at the end is that you have a better chance of playing over your head for a short stretch than over the long haul.
