Hi All -
Was watching Sci Fi science on ScienceHD and they had a show discussing singularity.
A person named "Marshall Brain" - dubbed "Technology Expert" (founder of the website "Howstuffworks.com") made the following statement:
"If we go back to the 1960's, there were computers doing 1,000 operations per second. 1980 - about a million operations per second. We go to the year 2000 - a billion operations per second with the Pentium 4. .... to today - we're doing about 10 billion operations per second. By 2020 we'd expect it to be a trillion. 2040 - we'd expect that to ramp up to about a Quadrillion operations per second. We think that maybe a human brain is worth about 10 Quadrillion operations per second, so sometime in that 2040 to 2050 range, we'd expect to see Parody (equivalence)."
The show then went on to discuss how machines will one day be as smart as the human brain and surpass it. However at the end of the show, they had a "Fun Fact" moment and the narrator said this:
"The Worlds most Powerful Super Computer is the Jaguar Cray XT5 at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. It's capable of 2.3 Quadrillion operations per second".
Hmm....
So guy number 1 was wrong? And if the brain is at 10 Quadrillion, and we're already to 2.3 Quadrillion, then its not going to take until 2020 let alone 2050 for us to get there. Does that mean the Singularity is significantly closer than the typical "50 years" estimate I keep hearing?
In addition to this, the following article states that the Chinese Supercomputer "Tianhi 1A" is now the fastest computer - performing at 1.4 times the speed of the Jaguar. That implies what? About 5 Quadrillion operations per second?
http://hplusmagazine...r-out-1st-place
-CB-
Edited by CryoBurger, 31 October 2010 - 05:12 AM.