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Thursday, August 13, 2015

YOU TELL ME: PRESIDENT SIGNS EXECUTIVE ORDER FOR WORLD’S FASTEST SUPER-COMPUTER

So many of your sent me this article, along with your own high octane speculations and insights, that I have to share it with a wider audience and, hopefully, spark some intriguing commentary and discussion as to what it might mean:
Obama Wants the US to Build the World’s Fastest Supercomputer
Now, in order to jump start this thinking process, consider only the huge implications of these statements:
Supercomputers are at the heart of a huge number of important scientific and defense research projects. They’re used by aerospace engineers to model planes and weapons, and by climatologists to predict the the near-term impact of hurricanes and the long-term effects of climate change. Researchers involved in the White House’s Precision Medicine initiative believe exaflop speed supercomputers could aid the creation of personalized drugs, while the European Commission’s Human Brain Project hopes they will help unlock the secrets of the human brain.
Several government agencies, most notably the Department of Energy, have been deeply involved in the development of supercomputers over the last few decades, but they’ve typically worked separately. The new initiative will bring together scientists and government agencies such as the Department of Energy, Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation to create a common agenda for pushing the field forward.
In other words, if one boils it down to the quinessence of things - alchemical reference deliberately intended - one has the following applications being explicity or implicitly suggested:
  1. aerodynamic modeling;
  2. weapons systems modeling, which would include thermonuclear, nuclear, thermobaric, and directed energy weapons, robotics, and so on;
  3. climate change modeling (which, by implication, would include deliberate weather modification and geoengineering);
  4. personalized medicine;
  5. neurophysiological mapping(and, by implications, modeling of consciousness from complex integrated networks, including complex network mapping itself)
...and so on. You'll note that the underlying spirit of the President's intentions is a rather interdisciplinary, and from that I would infer a rather analogical, one. This would include, as the article later suggests, a software architecture component.
The real question here is, is there an underlying covert purpose or purpose for all of this? I suspect, of course, that there is. and I suspect that that purpose is in part revealed by the interdisciplinary analogical spirit that underlies the request, for it seems to me that what is really being sought is a hardward and software that can adapt, without significant human input and modification, to a variety of uses in a variety of contexts. In short, I suspect that what is being called for here is the hardward and sortware architecture for artificial intelligence.
But that's just migh high octane speculation... here, it would be interesting to see what other people see in the call...

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