What happens when computers stop shrinking?

By around 2020, the age of the ever-smaller chip will come to an end -- and we'd better prepare for it
Michio Kaku
Saturday, Mar 19, 2011
http://www.salon.com/life/feature/2011/03/19/moores_law_ends_excerpt/index.html

This article is a condensed excerpt from Michio Kaku's new book, "The Physics of the Future."

I remember vividly sitting in Mark Weiser's office in Silicon Valley almost twenty years ago as he explained to me his vision of the future. Gesturing with his hands, he excitedly told me a new revolution was about to happen that would change the world. Weiser was part of the computer elite, working at Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, which was the first to pioneer the personal computer, the laser printer, and Windows-type architecture with graphical user interface), but he was a maverick, an iconoclast who was shattering conventional wisdom, and also a member of a wild rock band.

Back then (it seems like a lifetime ago), personal computers were new, just beginning to penetrate people's lives, as they slowly warmed up to the idea of buying large, bulky desktop computers in order to do spreadsheet analysis and a little bit of word processing. The Internet was still largely the isolated province of scientists like me, cranking out equations to fellow scientists in an arcane language.

There were raging debates about whether this box sitting on your desk would dehumanize civilization with its cold, unforgiving stare. Even political analyst William F. Buckley had to defend the word processor against intellectuals who railed against it and refused to ever touch a computer, calling it an instrument of the philistines.

It was in this era of controversy that Weiser coined the expression "ubiquitous computing." Seeing far past the personal computer, he predicted that the chips would one day become so cheap and plentiful that they would be scattered throughout the environment -- in our clothing, our furniture, the walls, even our bodies. And they would all be connected to the Internet, sharing data, making our lives more pleasant, monitoring all our wishes. Everywhere we moved, chips would be there to silently carry out our desires. The environment would be alive.

For its time, Weiser's dream was outlandish, even preposterous. Most personal computers were still expensive and not even connected to the Internet. The idea that billions of tiny chips would one day be as cheap as running water was considered lunacy.

And then I asked him why he felt so sure about this revolution. He calmly replied that computer power was growing exponentially, with no end in sight. Do the math, he implied. It was only a matter of time. (Sadly, Weiser did not live long enough to see his revolution come true, dying of cancer in 1999.)

The driving source behind Weiser's prophetic dreams is something called Moore's law, a rule of thumb that has driven the computer industry for fifty or more years, setting the pace for modern civilization like clockwork. Moore's law simply says that computer power doubles about every eighteen months. According to Moore's law, every Christmas your new computer games are almost twice as powerful (in terms of the number of transistors) as those from the previous year. Furthermore, as the years pass, this incremental gain becomes monumental. For example, when you receive a birthday card in the mail, it often has a chip that sings "Happy Birthday" to you. Remarkably, that chip has more computer power than all the Allied forces of 1945. Hitler, Churchill, or Roosevelt might have killed to get that chip. But what do we do with it? After the birthday, we throw the card and chip away. Today, your cell phone has more computer power than all of NASA back in 1969, when it placed two astronauts on the moon. Video games, which consume enormous amounts of computer power to simulate 3-D situations, use more computer power than mainframe computers of the previous decade. The Sony PlayStation of today, which costs $300, has the power of a military supercomputer of 1997, which cost millions of dollars.

So the old paradigm (a single chip inside a desktop computer or laptop connected to a computer) is being replaced by a new paradigm (thousands of chips scattered inside every artifact, such as furniture, appliances, pictures, walls, cars, and clothes, all talking to one another and connected to the Internet).

When these chips are inserted into an appliance, it is miraculously transformed. When chips were inserted into typewriters, they became word processors. When inserted into telephones, they became cell phones. When inserted into cameras, they became digital cameras. Pinball machines became video games. Phonographs became iPods. Airplanes became deadly Predator drones. Each time, an industry was revolutionized and was reborn. Eventually, almost everything around us will become intelligent. Chips will be so cheap they will even cost less than the plastic wrapper and will replace the bar code. Companies that do not make their products intelligent may find themselves driven out of business by their competitors that do.

Of course, we will still be surrounded by computer monitors, but they will resemble wallpaper, picture frames, or family photographs, rather than computers. Imagine all the pictures and photographs that decorate our homes today; now imagine each one being animated, moving, and connected to the Internet. When we walk outside, we will see pictures move, since moving pictures will cost as little as static ones.

The destiny of computers -- like other mass technologies like electricity, paper, and running water -- is to become invisible, that is, to disappear into the fabric of our lives, to be everywhere and nowhere, silently and seamlessly carrying out our wishes.

Today, when we enter a room, we automatically look for the light switch, since we assume that the walls are electrified. In the future, the first thing we will do on entering a room is to look for the Internet portal, because we will assume the room is intelligent. As novelist Max Frisch once said, "Technology [is] the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it."

We have to ask: How long can this computer revolution last? If Moore's law holds true for another fifty years, it is conceivable that computers will rapidly exceed the computational power of the human brain. By midcentury, a new dynamic will occur. As George Harrison once said, "All things must pass." Even Moore's law must end, and with it the spectacular rise of computer power that has fueled economic growth for the past half-century.

Today, we take it for granted, and in fact believe it is our birthright, to have computer products of ever-increasing power and complexity. This is why we buy new computer products every year, knowing that they are almost twice as powerful as last year's model. But if Moore's law collapses -- and every generation of computer products has roughly the same power and speed of the previous generation -- then why bother to buy new computers?

Since chips are placed in a wide variety of products, this could have disastrous effects on the entire economy. As entire industries grind to a halt, millions could lose their jobs, and the economy could be thrown into turmoil.

Years ago, when we physicists pointed out the inevitable collapse of Moore's law, traditionally the industry pooh-poohed our claims, implying that we were crying wolf. The end of Moore's law was predicted so many times, they said, that they simply did not believe it.

But not anymore.

Two years ago, I keynoted a major conference for Microsoft at their main headquarters in Seattle, Washington. Three thousand of the top engineers at Microsoft were in the audience, waiting to hear what I had to say about the future of computers and telecommunications. Staring out at the huge crowd, I could see the faces of the young, enthusiastic engineers who would be creating the programs that will run the computers sitting on our desks and laps. I was blunt about Moore's law, and said that the industry has to prepare for this collapse. A decade earlier, I might have been met with laughter or a few snickers. But this time I only saw people nodding their heads.

So the collapse of Moore's law is a matter of international importance, with trillions of dollars at stake. But precisely how it will end, and what will replace it, depends on the laws of physics. The answers to these physics questions will eventually rock the economic structure of capitalism.

To understand this situation, it is important to realize that the remarkable success of the computer revolution rests on several principles of physics. First, computers have dazzling speed because electrical signals travel at near the speed of light, which is the ultimate speed in the universe. In one second, a light beam can travel around the world seven times or reach the moon. Electrons are also easily moved around and loosely bound to the atom (and can be scraped off just by combing your hair, walking across a carpet, or by doing your laundry -- that's why we have static cling). The combination of loosely bound electrons and their enormous speed allows us to send electrical signals at a blinding pace, which has created the electric revolution of the past century.

Second, there is virtually no limit to the amount of information you can place on a laser beam. Light waves, because they vibrate much faster than sound waves, can carry vastly more information than sound. (For example, think of stretching a long piece of rope and then vibrating one end rapidly. The faster you wiggle one end, the more signals you can send along the rope. Hence, the amount of information you can cram onto a wave increases the faster you vibrate it, that is, by increasing its frequency.) Light is a wave that vibrates at roughly 1014 cycles per second (that is 1 with 14 zeros after it). It takes many cycles to convey one bit of information (a 1 or a 0). This means that a fiber-optic cable can carry roughly 1011 bits of information on a single frequency. And this number can be increased by cramming many signals into a single optical fiber and then bundling these fibers into a cable. This means that, by increasing the number of channels in a cable and then increasing the number of cables, one can transmit information almost without limit.

Third, and most important, the computer revolution is driven by miniaturizing transistors. A transistor is a gate, or switch, that controls the flow of electricity. If an electric circuit is compared to plumbing, then a transistor is like a valve controlling the flow of water. In the same way that the simple twist of a valve can control a huge volume of water, the transistor allows a tiny flow of electricity to control a much larger flow, thereby amplifying its power.

At the heart of this revolution is the computer chip, which can contain hundreds of millions of transistors on a silicon wafer the size of your fingernail. Inside your laptop there is a chip whose transistors can be seen only under a microscope. These incredibly tiny transistors are created the same way that designs on T-shirts are made.

Designs on T-shirts are mass-produced by first creating a stencil with the outline of the pattern one wishes to create. Then the stencil is placed over the cloth, and spray paint is applied. Only where there are gaps in the stencil does the paint penetrate to the cloth. Once the stencil is removed, one has a perfect copy of the pattern on the T-shirt.

Likewise, a stencil is made containing the intricate outlines of millions of transistors. This is placed over a wafer containing many layers of silicon, which is sensitive to light. Ultraviolet light is then focused on the stencil, which then penetrates through the gaps of the stencil and exposes the silicon wafer.

Then the wafer is bathed in acid, carving the outlines of the circuits and creating the intricate design of millions of transistors. Since the wafer consists of many conducting and semiconducting layers, the acid cuts into the wafer at different depths and patterns, so one can create circuits of enormous complexity.

One reason why Moore's law has relentlessly increased the power of chips is because UV light can be tuned so that its wavelength is smaller and smaller, making it possible to etch increasingly tiny transistors onto silicon wafers. Since UV light has a wavelength as small as 10 nanometers (a nanometer is a billionth of a meter), this means that the smallest transistor that you can etch is about thirty atoms across.

But this process cannot go on forever. At some point, it will be physically impossible to etch transistors in this way that are the size of atoms. You can even calculate roughly when Moore's law will finally collapse: when you finally hit transistors the size of individual atoms.

Around 2020 or soon afterward, Moore's law will gradually cease to hold true and Silicon Valley may slowly turn into a rust belt unless a replacement technology is found. Transistors will be so small that quantum theory or atomic physics takes over and electrons leak out of the wires. For example, the thinnest layer inside your computer will be about five atoms across. At that point, according to the laws of physics, the quantum theory takes over. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle states that you cannot know both the position and velocity of any particle. This may sound counterintuitive, but at the atomic level you simply cannot know where the electron is, so it can never be confined precisely in an ultrathin wire or layer and it necessarily leaks out, causing the circuit to short-circuit. According to the laws of physics, eventually the Age of Silicon will come to a close, as we enter the Post-Silicon Era.

Excerpted from Physics of the Future by Michio Kaku Copyright (c) 2011 by Michio Kaku.

Michio Kaku is a professor of physics at the CUNY Graduate Center, a co-founder of string field theory and the author of several science books. His new book is "Physics of the Future."

China Unveils World's Fastest Supercomputer

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2371631,00.asp

China Unveils World's Fastest Supercomputer
Leslie Horn
10.28.2010

China has introduced the world's fastest supercomputer, asserting itself as a global technology power. The creation of the machine called Tianhe-1A thus supplants the U.S. as the creator of the most powerful machine.

Tianhe, which means "milky way," was created at a research center at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT) in Tianjin, China. According to a New York Times report, the machine is 1.4 times faster than Cray XT5 Jaguar, the now second fastest supercomputer that is housed at a Tennessee national lab.

The system weighs 155 tons and has 103 cabinets that cover 1,000 square meters. Tianhe-1A's record speed is reached using 14,336 Intel Xeon CPUs and 7,168 Nvidia Tesla GPUs.

NUDT said that the computer's peak performance can hit 1.206 petaflops and runs at 563.1 teraflops using the Linpack benchmark developed by University of Tennessee computer scientist Jack Dongarra. Nvidia, however, said the machine set a new performance record of 2.507 petaflops.

To put that kind of power in perspective, Tianhe-1A can do in one day what a basic dual-core PC would take 160 years to achieve working continuously, NUDT said.

Created by 200 computer scientists over two years, Tianhe-1A cost $88 million and consumes 4.04 megawatts of electricity. NUDT said it will be used "to process seismic data for oil exploration, conduct biomedical computing, and [to] help design aerospace vehicles."

Officials from NUDT unveiled the lightning-fast machine Thursday at the Annual Meeting of National High Performance Computing in Beijing. Its release is especially timely. The official list of the world's top 500 supercomputers is released every six months, and it's set to be published next month. Dongorra told the Times that China's computer "blows away the existing number one machine."

The U.S. was unseated from the spot briefly in 2002 when Japan presented a "machine with more horsepower than the top 20 American computers combined," the Times report said. Until now, the U.S. was the top dog after reclaiming the number one rank in 2004.

The June 2010 top 500 list includes 291 U.S. machines, 145 from Europe, and 49 from Asia, NUDT said. Twenty of these machines are from China while U.S. supercomputers comprise the top 10.

Future Poll: World War III, Cancer Cure Are on the Way

http://www.aolnews.com/nation/article/pew-future-poll-world-war-iii-cancer-cure-are-on-the-way/

Future Poll: World War III, Cancer Cure Are on the Way
Joseph Schuman

AOL News (June 22) -- On the plus side, by the year 2050 there will be a cure for cancer, bionic limbs will perform better than mere flesh-and-bone arms and legs and cloning will be used to bring back extinct animals. Oh, and computers will be able to converse among themselves like human beings.

On the downside, those same computers might be responsible for the expected third world war, won't be able to thwart a terrorist nuclear attack on the U.S. and will utterly fail to stop the major energy crisis that will play havoc with the world.

These are among the predictions made for the next 40 years by majorities of Americans, according to a poll released today by the Pew Research Center.

The survey of more than 1,500 adults taken in late April also suggests that Americans' world view has darkened a bit over a decade that opened with a recession and the worst terrorist attack in history, featured two wars that stymied U.S. military prowess and ended with a full-blown global financial crisis.

In April, 64 percent of respondents said they were optimistic for their lives and families over the next 40 years, and 61 percent were optimistic for the future of the U.S. But that's down from responses of 81 percent for respondents' lives and families and 70 percent for the country when the same survey was conducted in 1999. Pessimism for lives and families has climbed to 31 percent from 15 percent in that time, and for the U.S. future to 36 percent from 27 percent.

But the survey suggests Americans remain confident in a future filled with wonders that today are the stuff of fiction.

Eighty-one percent said computers will probably or definitely be able to converse like humans by 2050, 71 percent said there will be a cure for cancer, 66 percent expected artificial limbs that outperform natural ones, 63 percent predicted astronauts will land on Mars, 53 percent said ordinary people will travel in space and 50 percent said we will find evidence of life elsewhere in the universe.

While 51 percent said an extinct animal will probably or definitely be brought back by cloning, only 48 percent said humans will be cloned -- the same share that expected computer chips to be embedded in Americans for identification. And 42 percent said scientists will be able to tell thoughts from brain scans.

Among the threats to the country in the coming decades, another world war still seems probable to the most respondents (58 percent), followed closely by a major terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon (53 percent), while only 31 percent said an asteroid probably or definitely will hit the earth by 2050.

Among other menaces just over the horizon, 72 percent of Americans said there will be a major world energy crisis, and 66 percent expect the Earth to warm. Tellingly, younger people are more pessimistic about global warming (77 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds versus 61 percent of Americans 65 or older), and Republicans are much less worried about it than Democrats (48 percent versus 83 percent).

Americans are also divided on another subject that many associate with the end of the world, according to Pew: the return of Jesus Christ. Just over four in 10 respondents expect the Christian version of the messiah to show up by 2050, while 46 percent said this will probably or definitely not happen in that time.

Sense of Touch Comes to Computers

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/04/AR2008030402078.html

Sense of Touch Comes to Computers
By DANIEL LOVERING
The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 4, 2008

PITTSBURGH -- A controller developed at Carnegie Mellon University allows computer users to manipulate three-dimensional images and explore virtual environments not only through sight and sound, but by using their sense of touch.

The device, expected to be used mainly for research, training and industrial purposes, comes close to the sensitivity of the human hand.

Using magnetic fields, the so-called haptic device replicates the response a hand might have to textures and gravitational forces, said Ralph L. Hollis, a Carnegie Mellon professor who developed the controller. Haptic refers to devices that convey the sense of touch.

"We believe this device provides the most realistic sense of touch of any haptic interface in the world today," he said.

The controller _ like a joystick topped with a block that can be grasped _ has just one moving part and rests in a bowl-like structure connected to a computer. Two of the controllers can be used simultaneously to pick up and move virtual objects on a monitor.

In a demonstration Tuesday, visitors to Hollis' lab were invited to move an image of a pin across a plate of various textures, causing the controller to bump along ripples, vibrate across fine striations and glide across smooth areas.

On one computer, users could "feel" the contours of a virtual rabbit.

Hollis said his researchers had built 10 of the devices, six of which were to be sent to other universities across the country and in Canada, and that a new company, Butterfly Haptics, would begin marketing the device in June or July.

The controller, which Hollis said will cost "much less" than $50,000, could enable a would-be surgeon to operate on a virtual human organ and sense the texture of tissue or give a designer the feeling of fitting a part into a virtual jet engine.

The interface might also convey the feeling of wind under the wings of unmanned military planes, Hollis said.

Hollis and his research team built an initial version of the device in 1997, but refined it _ and lowered its cost _ in recent years with the help of a National Science Foundation grant.

"We have gone from the prototype to a much more advanced system that other researchers can use," he said in a statement.

Haptic devices are not new, and such technology is fast becoming more sophisticated, Hollis noted. Vibrating cell phones and some automotive accessories and video games already convey physical sensations to users.

The system developed at Carnegie Mellon differs from other technologies that simulate hand responses to touch because it relies on a part that floats in a magnetic field rather than on mechanical linkages and cables, according to Hollis.
___
On the Net:

Butterfly Haptics LLC: http://butterflyhaptics.com/

Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute: http://www.ri.cmu.edu/

Computerized checkers player can't be beaten

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003797714_checkers20.html

Computerized checkers player can't be beaten
By Robert Mitchum
Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO — With uniform pieces and diagonal moves, checkers is simple enough for a child to learn. But to achieve absolute mastery of the game, scientists needed to run hundreds of computers for nearly 20 years, analyzing roughly 500 billion billion scenarios.

By completing the project, a team of Canadian researchers have officially "solved" checkers, creating an unbeatable program that will choose the best move in every possible situation.

This achievement represents a major benchmark in the field of artificial intelligence, which uses games to develop complex problem-solving strategies for computers.

In 1994, a program named Chinook beat the reigning human world checkers champion, a feat that preceded Deep Blue's famous chess defeat of grandmaster Garry Kasparov by three years. But even after proving dominant over humans, finishing the calculations required to solve the game required 13 more years of research.

"Had I known 18 years ago it was this big of a problem, I probably would've done something else," said Jonathan Schaeffer, who led the project at the University of Alberta, "but once I started, I had to finish."

"It's 1 million times bigger than the biggest computation previously solved optimally," he said.

Detailed Thursday on the Web site of the journal Science, methods developed by Schaeffer's team in the process of solving the game may be applicable to other areas, such as business and biology. The resulting program proves that checkers is a "draw" game; in other words, perfect play by both players will always result in a draw.

However, checkers experts say there is no fear that the solving effort will ruin the game for traditional players, amateur or professional.

"No human can possibly memorize the billions of combinations that Dr. Schaeffer has covered," said Richard Beckwith, player representative for the American Checkers Foundation. "You still have to play as you see it, based on your own expertise and knowledge."

The entire solution includes 500,995,484,682,338,672,639 possible board configurations, according to the study, which was funded by the Canadian and Alberta governments.

Murray Campbell, a member of the original Deep Blue team, said the scope of the solution was a testament to the complexity of the game.

"Checkers is actually quite a difficult game — much more difficult than most people give it credit for," said Campbell, a research staff member at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y.

The insights gleaned from teaching computers how to play checkers can be applied to practical, computation-intensive problems. For example, Schaeffer said, the technology could be used to determine the optimal schedule for a massive construction project like the one at Ground Zero in New York.

Schaeffer co-founded a company to use the same approach to hunt for meaningful patterns in long strings of DNA and other biological building blocks.

On Thursday, the Alberta team made the new solving program available to play against on the Internet at www.cs.ualberta.ca/~chinook. Schaeffer, however, doesn't expect it to be a runaway hit.

"In some sense it's not interesting," he said. "People play games for fun, and knowing you can never beat it isn't fun."

Meanwhile, Schaeffer's group has moved on to a more profitable game: designing a poker program capable of beating even professional players. Next week, their current program, named Polaris, will challenge two pros for a $50,000 prize in Vancouver, B.C., at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence conference.

Schaeffer speculates that human supremacy at poker remains intact — for now.

"I think humans are still better, but it's inevitable that poker will succumb to technology," he said. "Computers will be better than humans eventually, probably in less than five years."

Additional information from Los Angeles Times