Speed of thought?

jbod

Senior member
Sep 20, 2001
495
0
0
Is there a theoretical limit to processor speed?

I'm not talking about unit calculation from multiple CPU's that can process giga-quadrants/sec but...this.

Can CPU's only get so fast up to a point where the next step is it actually reads your mind? Where you would think what commands you want to execute and it happens? (I know there are studies that this can be done, but I'm talking practical terms, common applications, not move a cursor across the screen)

Does computing speed stop when it reaches this point? Is there a gap between you clicking a mouse where the command executes instantaneously and the CPU actually reading your mind and doing the work for you. The command cannot execute before you make a physical gesture can it? Like typing a paper, or navigating directory structures, that sort of thing.

Or is this all in the programming of software?

What do you guys think?
 

Shalmanese

Platinum Member
Sep 29, 2000
2,157
0
0
Well, for all practical purposes today, the average user is unable to notice extra performance but there will always be new applications that will require more processing power. Personally, I think that voice recognition will be the "killer app" for hih end processors in the next couple of years.

And becuase of theoretical considerations, certain computer applications can NEVER have enough processing power, cryptography being one (faster processors can do stronger encryption which requires stronger processors to break)
 

Shalmanese

Platinum Member
Sep 29, 2000
2,157
0
0
Face recognition and VR come up as other examples of interfaces that would use far more processing power than we have availible
 

Yoshitoshi

Member
May 25, 2001
140
0
0
I would think that user intervention in any application is on average the slowest part of an application process. As mentioned in the previous replies to this thread, processor speed only affects the automated parts of an application i.e. calculations etc. (apologies if this sounds patronising)

Aside from physcal processor architecture and heat dissipation, surely the next rate determining step will be the time it takes for electrical potential changes between high and low ( 1 and 0 ) and the speed of electrons between the individual components within the processor.

Even if you could make a processor that used light (photons) instead of potential (electrons) you would only double the speed. And you could not have processor components closer together than a few photon / electron diameters.

That is unless you could control things on a quantum level i.e sub-nano processor components, then you could have 'flavoured' processors!

Yoshi.
 

Moohooya

Senior member
Oct 10, 1999
677
0
0
There will always be demmand for faster processors. There are so many problems today that cannot be solved due to a lack of processing power, or ones that take years to solve.

Imagine a car that could drive safely on all roads. You could send the acr to pick the kids up from school. (I doubt they'd let any current computer driven cars within 5 miles of a school!)

Real time face, fingerprint, eye recognition. Whenever you went someone secure, a school, coutshouse, airport, border etc. It would determine who you were against all known people. Known terrorists could play in the backyard only. As soon as they tried to get on a bus, they would be recognised. (Yes, there are a million privacy issues here, but that is not the point.)

Forcasting. With good models, you could forcast the weather many months in advance, even years. Predict mudslides, droughts, hurricanes. We could even create models to forcast societies and humanity
 

Elledan

Banned
Jul 24, 2000
8,880
0
0


<< Is there a theoretical limit to processor speed? >>


Yes. A processor can only finish processing data as fast as it receives it. A Quantum computer would be able to solve certain types of calculations almost instantly.

There'll always be some time between the CPU receiving input and outputting the results, but CPU's will become so fast that this time will play no role anymore after a while.

Anyway, there'll always be a need for faster systems. Certain types of simulations and CGI-movies are always hungry for more power.
 

nirgis

Senior member
Mar 4, 2001
636
0
0
"Forcasting. With good models, you could forcast the weather many months in advance, even years. Predict mudslides, droughts, hurricanes. We could even create models to forcast societies and humanity"

Sorry, but this is not possible regardless of computer power. The entire field of chaos theory has been built around the principle that complex systems such as weather and natural phenomena (floods, hurricanes, etc.) cannot be predicted
 

Evadman

Administrator Emeritus<br>Elite Member
Feb 18, 2001
30,990
5
81


<< Sorry, but this is not possible regardless of computer power. The entire field of chaos theory has been built around the principle that complex systems such as weather and natural phenomena (floods, hurricanes, etc.) cannot be predicted >>



What if we kill the butterfly?

That is an inside joke that some of the chaos theroy guys will get and leave he rest of you scratching your heads, but that's ok
 

HereThereandEverywhere

Senior member
Sep 3, 2001
203
0
0
Sure nothing like a Butterfly effect allusion right in the middle of all this.

Regarding the topic, there is always a demand for more, and demands must be met...money must be made...theoretically there is no point where it comes "too" fast, because there will always be a usage for that little bit of speed that we keep on adding...i.e. encryption and all those ideas mentioned above.
 

Shalmanese

Platinum Member
Sep 29, 2000
2,157
0
0


<<
What if we kill the butterfly?
>>



the Chinese will lock you up because the IOC officials are in town
 

Turkey

Senior member
Jan 10, 2000
839
0
0
Currently the theoretical limit of processor speed is electrical in nature... beyond that I can't explain. A computer's user interface has next to nothing to do with the processor though, so increases in processing speed wouldn't ever have the effect you mentioned unless the processor had more to do with the user interface.
 

MustPost

Golden Member
May 30, 2001
1,923
0
0
Voice recognition has been the future killer app for the last 7 years, do you really think its coming into commom use anytime soon.


<<What if we kill the butterfly?

That is an inside joke that some of the chaos theroy guys will get and leave he rest of you scratching your heads, but that's ok >>

Yeh we all saw Jurrasic Park, we get it.
 

jbod

Senior member
Sep 20, 2001
495
0
0
so increases in processing speed wouldn't ever have the effect you mentioned unless the processor had more to do with the user interface.

This is what I'm wondering about Turkey.

 

Turkey

Senior member
Jan 10, 2000
839
0
0
Well let's just assume for simplicity that there are two user inputs to your PC, your keyboard and mouse. Then there's also one user output from your PC, your monitor. The idea of a user interface is that you can replace the innards of the thing you are interfacing with, but still have the same functions performed. The non-PC analogy is that all cars have a steering wheel, gas pedal and brake pedal, but even though different cars have different engines and brake systems and all sorts of complicated fuel systems and whatnot, a person with a license (knows how to use the wheel, gas, and brake) can use any car. In a PC, that means that anyone that knows how to use a keyboard/mouse/monitor (and Windows) can use a PC, even though it might have a different speed or brand or both of processor.

I'll be imprecise about what goes on inside the PC here... when you type a key on the keyboard or move/click the mouse, an interrupt is generated, which just means that a voltage on a wire from your kb or mouse changed (UI is actually done by polling, but this is imprecise). With the mouse or kb, there are other wires that send what the specific key/movement/click was and store that in a register which is a temporary storage location for bits. The interrupt changes what code is being run on the processor to interrupt handling code, which is basically a huge decision making process that MS has written that determines what caused the interrupt. Once it figures out what caused the interrupt - key press, mouse move, mouse click, or any other of dozens or hundreds of things, it runs code that will be able to take action based on what the interrupt was. This is basically a driver. The driver gets the value in the register ("The key that was pressed was an 'a' key") and places it in another register. Then the OS takes over doing whatever it does, and different OS's will do different things, and stuff gets displayed on the screen based on what the OS decides. Simply speaking, unless the processor gets interrupted from doing what it is doing, it will just sit there and continue to do what it was doing before. But the processor doesn't ever really know what's going on after it gets interrupted either - it just knows that whenever a voltage on one of its input lines changes (an interrupt happens), it has to start executing different code than what it's executing now. It's pretty dumb.

Hope that makes it clear why the UI and processor are almost totally independent - all the processor does is execute proper code when it's triggered by some user input. The code is what makes stuff appear on the screen. Now if the processor had brain wave sensors on it that could determine what you wanted to do, then it would be different. But you would (probably) still know what you wanted to do before the processor did, and still all the processor would do is execute proper code when it is triggered by your brain waves - it would just be interrupted differently.

But a computer could be made to simulate reading your mind. For example, if you always sat down at 8:45 am in front of your computer and opened your browser and went to cnn.com, then there could be software that would detect this pattern, and at 8:44 am it would start your browser and browse to cnn.com so that when you sat down at 8:45 am, it would look like it knew exactly what you were going to do. Or if you replied to every post on a certain site , then whenever you browsed to that site and reached the bottom of the page, it would automatically go to the reply page, then you might think it was reading your mind.
 

Shalmanese

Platinum Member
Sep 29, 2000
2,157
0
0
The limitations of a UI, however, can be based on processor speed, the different possibilitys of UI's I mentioned above have all been hinered by the fact that there is not enough processing power. A fully VR UI would take massive amounts of processing but it is still (I think) a polynomial amount which will be reached after ar arbitrarily short period of applying Moores law. The ability to scale Travelling salesmen problems and the like, however, are far beyond the reaches of Moores law which is why I say that there will always exist problems which are just computationally too hard for a computer to handle. As far as I am aware of though, there are no UI implementations that are even NP.

As for the whole car analogy however, a car's UI has also changed with faster rpocessors as shown by the rapid digitalisation of everything inside the car as well as stuff like ABS etc.
 

MustPost

Golden Member
May 30, 2001
1,923
0
0
<<But a computer could be made to simulate reading your mind. For example, if you always sat down at 8:45 am in front of your computer and opened your browser and went to cnn.com, then there could be software that would detect this pattern, and at 8:44 am it would start your browser and browse to cnn.com so that when you sat down at 8:45 am, it would look like it knew exactly what you were going to do. Or if you replied to every post on a certain site , then whenever you browsed to that site and reached the bottom of the page, it would automatically go to the reply page, then you might think it was reading your mind. >>

Could automatically put, "pics?" into replies.
 
Jan 15, 2002
71
0
0
Definitely of the opinion that there's plenty of stuff that computers can't currently do - in fact this is one of the most inventive discussions on the topic I've yet seen. The only problem with many of the applications being touted as the killer app for high end processors is that the algorithm is not well defined. No one knows how to get accurate voice recognition backed up by some sort of understanding of the words being said, in order to produce a system which is robust in the presence of noise and natural variations in people's pronunciations. Without a solid theoretical underpinning for a voice recognition application, it has always been impossible to say whether someone will be able to produce good software to run on todays hardware. It may be that when a good algorithm is found, it will run perfectly adequately on a 300 MHz processor.
 

Shalmanese

Platinum Member
Sep 29, 2000
2,157
0
0
VR would be, IMHO, a perfect example of something we CAN do in software but not adequetly in hardware, Face and voice recognition would be something that we can probably do in hardware but not in software yet.

 

Shalmanese

Platinum Member
Sep 29, 2000
2,157
0
0
Oh, and BTW: what I originally meant with voice recognition as being the killer app was not the computer actually understanding what was said but simply that it recoginsed the words and could act on them in a pre-defined way. I think this has been hindered as much by software as by hardware.

eg. Open Quake would open the quake3.exe file
 

mrzed

Senior member
Jan 29, 2001
811
0
0
I agree with some on this thread. Personally, I think all the biometric stuff is going to be the next killer app, but not voice recognition. (insert crusty old timer comment here)

I remember going to a computer show as a young kid and seeing a hyped up Tandy of some sort running voice recognition. This was very early 1980's. It's been a lot longer than 7 years, and although we may be coming ever closer to natural language recognition, there are practical considerations that will keep it from wide acceptance. Not least of which is where most computers are used: noisy, busy offices and homes.

I suspect the key with voice recognition will be getting it into smaller packages, cell phones, PDA's and the like.

Getting rid of the mouse will be at least as important. there are already specialized apps for tracking eye movements. I see the day not too long from now when you sit at the computer and it finds your eye and follows it around on the screen.

If we took this to the logical limit, navigating information by looking, it would probably not feel all that different than mind reading. If a computer could actually read our minds directly (I imagine through some sort of ananlysis of electrical activity in the brain) then I think that would be the end of all human privacy.
 

jbod

Senior member
Sep 20, 2001
495
0
0
The way I see the future is this: two paths of evolution.

One, there will always be a need for more efficiency and power in processing. Whether it be to calculate "killing the butterfly", TSP equations, biological algorithms, etc. Therefore we could never have enough computational speed. I agree.

And two, an awareness of the breach between the UI and the user. The faster the hardware[slash]software combination can interpret commands, the happier the end user. Digress with me here: when I feel the need to scratch my forehead, there's not much to it. I think about it and it happens. If that concept could be applied to computing it would change the world as we know it, for better or worse. If a computer could read my mind, which I doubt will ever happen anytime soon, I would pay an exorbitant amount of money to buy one. Would you not? Yes I know the big brother issues loom, but just think about the implications! Plus the command is all that I'm looking for, not the random thought of the secretary....

So the second point is the reason for my questions to begin with. (this is getting into AI I think) This is why I believe there is a limit to processor speed....er...I mean computing. (whatever)

 

UCBPhantom

Member
Jul 19, 2001
43
0
0
i can envision numerous comical scenarios where i would *not* want to be hooked up to a computer which read my mind =). how often do you think "i wish this computer would die." what if it did, to obey?
 

Becks2k

Senior member
Oct 2, 2000
391
0
0
haha that last post reminded me of something totaly unrelated but ya might find it funny.

I just installed linux and was going insane tring to get my internet to work right and I got pissed off and started messing with other stuff. I put the computer in "standby" or "sleep" or one of those, and then it wouldn't come out of it so I rebooted and booted xp instead cause I was too pissed.

I open up irc to see who's around and go "linux is f*cking gay" and hit enter.. exactly when i hit enter, like PERFECTLY my computer reboots... I swear there wasn't a 100ms difference betwen the 2. - it turns out that the sleep/standby or whatever had turned my cpu's fan off(eeks athlon!) but my computer was safe in the end

still taught me a lesson not to say bad things about linux.
 

CFster

Golden Member
Oct 16, 1999
1,903
0
76
Word is Moore's Law will hit a wall in fifteen years. That's when the theoretical speed limit of silicon is reached. The next step will me molecular computers they say.
 

Stremik

Member
Jan 27, 2002
33
0
0
"The next step will me molecular computers they say. "
That's what I'm afraid of!
We are trying to simulate our own brain, when we dont know how to use it.An avarage human being uses up to 3% of his brain potential(genius 4 to 5%)and it probably should be this way. The rest of the potential is being used very rarely. In some extreme situations and that's when a human is capable of doing miracles. If people create something half as smart as human brain... we are all done for it!
Personally, I like computers the way they are right now. FASTER? Great! I don't mind. SMARTER? No way! I prefer to be able to tell it what to do, than to be told by it to do something.
 
sale-70-410-exam    | Exam-200-125-pdf    | we-sale-70-410-exam    | hot-sale-70-410-exam    | Latest-exam-700-603-Dumps    | Dumps-98-363-exams-date    | Certs-200-125-date    | Dumps-300-075-exams-date    | hot-sale-book-C8010-726-book    | Hot-Sale-200-310-Exam    | Exam-Description-200-310-dumps?    | hot-sale-book-200-125-book    | Latest-Updated-300-209-Exam    | Dumps-210-260-exams-date    | Download-200-125-Exam-PDF    | Exam-Description-300-101-dumps    | Certs-300-101-date    | Hot-Sale-300-075-Exam    | Latest-exam-200-125-Dumps    | Exam-Description-200-125-dumps    | Latest-Updated-300-075-Exam    | hot-sale-book-210-260-book    | Dumps-200-901-exams-date    | Certs-200-901-date    | Latest-exam-1Z0-062-Dumps    | Hot-Sale-1Z0-062-Exam    | Certs-CSSLP-date    | 100%-Pass-70-383-Exams    | Latest-JN0-360-real-exam-questions    | 100%-Pass-4A0-100-Real-Exam-Questions    | Dumps-300-135-exams-date    | Passed-200-105-Tech-Exams    | Latest-Updated-200-310-Exam    | Download-300-070-Exam-PDF    | Hot-Sale-JN0-360-Exam    | 100%-Pass-JN0-360-Exams    | 100%-Pass-JN0-360-Real-Exam-Questions    | Dumps-JN0-360-exams-date    | Exam-Description-1Z0-876-dumps    | Latest-exam-1Z0-876-Dumps    | Dumps-HPE0-Y53-exams-date    | 2017-Latest-HPE0-Y53-Exam    | 100%-Pass-HPE0-Y53-Real-Exam-Questions    | Pass-4A0-100-Exam    | Latest-4A0-100-Questions    | Dumps-98-365-exams-date    | 2017-Latest-98-365-Exam    | 100%-Pass-VCS-254-Exams    | 2017-Latest-VCS-273-Exam    | Dumps-200-355-exams-date    | 2017-Latest-300-320-Exam    | Pass-300-101-Exam    | 100%-Pass-300-115-Exams    |
http://www.portvapes.co.uk/    | http://www.portvapes.co.uk/    |