

The title of the research project is: When Will Robots Dream Of Electric Sheep? We wanted to know how long it might take before ONE man-sized computer might be able to match wits with a human. Given the recent coverage of IBM's Watson, we knew it wouldn't be too far away. Liam and I figured 20 years, tops. Watson's able to challenge the top-rated contestants on Jeopardy! and win. But Watson is actually a distributed super computer. 750 servers. Something like 2880 CPUs. 11 Terrabytes of RAM! Hardly man-sized. But Moore's Law suggests that the number of transistors on a CPU double every 18 months. So the processing power effectively doubles. If 750 servers can match wits with a human, how long before ONE server is 750 times more powerful? Using Moore's Law, we see that in 10 generations (15 years!) servers ought to be more than 750 times more powerful than todays servers. So in or before the year 2015, one server ought to be equal to Watson. At least the theory we presented.
The project gets reviewed on Wednesday. We'll see how well Liam does. But we're glad to be done with it!
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