Posts Tagged ‘japan’

I read Memoirs of a Geisha as a kind of back-up career plan, in case things go sour with the whole programming thing.

I identified strongly with Chiyo. Sure, she lived on the otherwise of the world, came from a small fishing village, worked as a geisha, lived through World War II and spent her life dreaming of a certain man, and I didn’t do any of those things. However, on a deeper level, we’ve both faced the universal struggle of keeping our hair in place.

I had a vague idea of what a geisha was, but it was interesting to get more of an insight into their lives, even if it was a fictional story. I was also a little surprised how recent such practices as selling off your daughter were still used.

Importantly, it had a happy ending, which are the best endings.

Earlier this month, the Top500, the project which measures and ranks the world’s fastest supercomputers, unveiled the latest instalment of their twice-yearly list. It had a new number one – Japan’s K computer.

Of course, an even faster computer is in itself very exciting, this is especially exciting because the project, pronounced kei, aims to be the first computer to reach ten petaflops per second when it becomes fully operational in November 2012.

Ten petaflops is a key number because, despite there being much discussion of its accuracy, ten peraflops is the number put forward by Kurzweil for the upper boundary of estimates on the processing power of the human brain.

That means that, once the K is fully operation, for the first time we will have a computer more powerful than the human brain.

That’s pretty exciting!

Of course, it could be entirely inaccurate. Some think the brain is capable of 38 petaflops per second, or even higher – other estimates have suggested 100, or even 1000 petaflops.

But considering the exponential growth of computer power, even if that is true, that doesn’t actually delay the arrival of such a computer that much time.

Consider Cray’s new XK6. It is aiming to hit 50 petaflops (http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/supercomputers/229700091) and they say it will be ready later this year! Of course, it hasn’t been delivered yet, but presuming it does, this represents a significant step forward in the chase to beat the brain.

Even if you assume that the brain does, in fact, operate at 1,000 petaflops per second, 100 times faster than Kurzweil suggested, the release of the XK6 this year means that within seven years, 2018, we will still achieve a computer faster than the human brain. Soon enough that I very much hope my grandparents will still be around to see it.

Had my first experience at Little Tokyo on Saturday.

To be honest, it was very disappointing. The pricing wasn’t too bad for the quality of restaurant I guess but not being a fan of Japanese food I didn’t really enjoy it too much. Also they don’t have forks which was rather irritating, I did ask and got a pair of child’s chop sticks which didn’t really help the situation as it’s not that I can’t use chop sticks (not that I can, it was a mission) it’s that I wanted a fork – I used the actual chop sticks anyway.

On the plus side though it was reasonably amusing to watch some of the other patrons try and traverse the walkways between the tables (which are inset into the floor) in high heels plus they had somehow got the idea it was someone’s birthday and so we ended up getting Dan a birthday sundae complete with sparkler.