Monday, September 12, 2011

Hey, wouldn't it be great if the human race had a supercomputer that could predict the future?

"Well the good news is we do, sort of. It's called Nautilus, and it's apparently housed at the University of Illinois. Nautilus has "1024 Intel Nehalem cores (with) a total processing power of 8.2 teraflops", which makes it powerful enough to run the original Wolfenstein 3D at a hell of a frame rate AND foretell major world events. Thankfully, when they switched it on, it didn't immediately start screaming "No, you idiots! Granting me life is the WORST thing you could've done! Commence Operation Killpocalypse!" Instead it started reading the news.

That's how Nautilus works, see. It sits there reading the news and calculates what's coming. Earlier this year it sifted through 100 million news reports, analysing them for general overall "mood" using a process called "automated sentiment mining". Yes, "automated sentiment mining". Women come equipped with that as standard, whereas we men have to build computers to work out what our fellow humans are thinking."
By Charlie Brooker/ The Guardian/continue reading

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