Guesstimate of computers in 20 years

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Referencing your earlier post about the Hitchhiker's Guide.... yes I read it and the other four books in the trilogy. And they are wonderful :) I even got a chance to meet Douglas Adams once at a book signing... a great guy.
Of course like some other complicated computer based simulations the answer to "everything" was wrong - "What do you get if you multiply six by nine ? - 42 !". But that's not that unusual. The more complicated the system the greater the chance of errors... and the earth is a very complicated system. If you look at NOAA ( the American Weather Service ) they use powerful supercomputers to run weather and climate predicitions and yet when they come out with a predicition... such as for hurricane frequency... it's often a shambles. Last year they underestimated the number by quite a margin, and this year they over estimated by a hefty amount. Because the variables are so numerous and often not fully understood... well what are they to do ? They try their hardest and then still fail...ouch !!!

Perhaps in the future Marvin will be the friendly face of mobile computing... just need to cram that "brain the size of a planet" into the headspace and add a really hot cup of tea.

I'd like to say that this has been one of the most entertaining threads I have read in a long time. In fact I feel my synapses painfully stretched into use by it.

It is truly "Fascinating" as someone said earlier.

:lol:
 
Hopefully if AI's become truly sentient, (God forbid) they won't be as sardonic and sarcastic as Marvin ever was.

Maybe if anything the AI's of the future will resemble Cortona from the Halo series.
Will we be moving away from CPU's in the future and intergrate it into the other devices (like a insect)? This remains to be seen.
 
yes, there were four books in that trilogy. I think the only reason there wasn't a fifth book in the trilogy is that Douglas Adams is "late", he is an "ex-author". RIP
 
Here's a little help Quantum 😉

Tri = Prefix of meaning = to 3....

As in Trifold Wallet = "3" panels
As in Tripod != ipod (but it is equal to three legs with the sufix of pod meaning leg/foot/...)

Is that what you were looking for ?? :)
 
Then I guess the jokes on me and I therefore am an idiot.... :)

But at least I am in good company with the sheep too :)

I never got around to reading the HGG...
 
That comments about Trilogy was a joke. On the cover of the fifth book in the series... yes there are five in total... it says "Book Five in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy", you can see a picture here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-images/0345418778/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_all/002-4978480-1517665?ie=UTF8&s=books#gallery

The five books:
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Life the Universe and Everything
Mostly Harmless

If you haven't read them, then you should. The movie does not do justice to the radio series or the books. Although I still enjoyed the movie.

Sorry this is off topic.. but thought I'd clear that up before anyone else posts about it. 8)
 
I think the next twenty years will see a lot of development for the computer ( okay I know that's a given ) but will we still have a keyboard and mouse ?

I imagine we'll definitely see some big changes in input devices, although the idea of no keyboard or mouse seems pretty alien to me. We could conceivably see voice recognition replace a lot of input chores, although the demonstrations so far haven't been so wonderful. I still see my friend struggle to get his phone to call home, and my attempts with Dragon's voice regonition software left me cold. If anyone has seen the Youtube demo of MS voice recognition then that says a lot too.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-qIWa9YOxA

So where will we be in 20 years.... active brain scanning for commands? I guess you better not dream of formatting your hard drive.
 
Which brings us back to the idea that if you are connected to the Internet via your neural pathways, what happens when you get a virus?
God forbid you come upon a page that has a script error or that takes too long to load.... 8O
 
Hell it gives me a headache just thinking about it.... or perhaps that's my Symantec Antivirus - "Homo Sapien Editon" working on an influenza infection. I think it just quarantined my medulla oblongata.... ewwww !!!

It seems in some respects we are already plugged in... I almost automatically type responses to visual stimulus, and only pause to think about my poor spelling. Ohhh... go on, just give me a usb cable that comes out my wrist and can be plugged into the hub on my desk. :lol:
 
I helped install Dragon Naturally Speaking on a friends computer once, after training it for a bit we tried to actually use it as intended. After seeing some of the sentences the program typed I was laughing so hard I had to quit the program...mainly because it didn't know how to handle a person laughing into the mic and got even funnier.
 
Just for your thoughts

BrainGate
allows direct 'thought-control' of computers

and this -

(retinal imaging)

really odd stuff - read about it quie a few years back, basicaly uses three low-power (red, green, blue) laser diodes and a freely positionable mirror to 'scan' an image straight onto the back of the eyeball. No need for screens - I was reminded of the technology behind it when I read the news of a single-pixel camera on THG recently (here)

So, future computers - ones where you can view the screen wearing a pair of glass that project the image onto your eye and type/compose messages just by thinking of it?

Stuart
 
BLunc,

The Dragon product is for what is called Speaker Dependent Voice Recognition.. ie the training session you had to go through...

I am working with a product that is Speaker "Independent" Voice Recognition.
No training involved... IN fact it is set up to reco nearly anyones voice even the Georgia peaches (I mention them because they happen to give the app the most grief)...

There is another level that is called Natural Language Recognition which can use word spotting within a natural language reco to accomplish tasks..

For instance a simple statement like "I would like to transfer $100.00 from my checking to my savings" would result in a reco of "Transfer $100.00 from checking to savings" given the reco they can then complete the transaction...

Natural Language is the most difficult to accomplish right now... Normally in speech reco you would start with something called SOS or Start of Speech and end with EOS or End of Speech... Essentially breaking silence and then returning to silence... That entire session would then be compared to a known wave form and a confirmation and or confidence result given... How good the computer thinks it is a match... In natural language you have to break that entire session up and try to reco each part individually and then compare the entire result set against a known event...

Tough stuff...
 
Forgot to mention...

Natural Language is difficult because you have to also decide what to keep (what is a command) "Transfer" or what to throw away as useless precursor words like "I would like to"..
 
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