\nHere\u2019s what Eugene Goostman isn\u2019t: a supercomputer. It is not a groundbreaking, super-fast piece of innovative hardware but simply a cleverly-coded piece of software, heir to a program called ELIZA that was first developed\u2014as a joke\u2014in the nineteen-sixties.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
This is an example of what I call “IBM Thinking”. I used to work for IBM, and one of the (many) frustrations there was a deep-seated belief that “innovation” and “technology” meant hardware<\/em>. Software is just the silly unimportant stuff that runs on top of hardware; hardware<\/em> is what matters.<\/p>\n According to this attitude, any advance in technology, any new achievement, must happen because someone created better hardware<\/em> that made it possible. A system that beats the turing test? If it’s real, it must be a new supercomputer! If it’s not, then it’s not interesting!<\/p>\n This is, in a word, nonsense.<\/p>\n
Hardware advances. But so does software. And these days, the big advances are more likely to be in software than in hardware.<\/p>\n
There’s a mathematical law, called Church’s thesis, which we’ve known about for a long time. Put simply, it says that there is a maximum limit in computation. All computing devices, no matter how they’re designed or built, are ultimately, at best, equivalent to other computing computing devices. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Turing machine, or a PC, or a supercomputing cluster – the set of problems that can be solved by computation is fixed. Different devices may be able to solve a given problem faster<\/em> by some amount, but it can’t solve problems that are truly unsolvable.<\/p>\n We’ve gotten to the point where we can build incredibly fast computers. But those computers are all built on the same basic model of computing that we’ve been using for decades. When a problem that seemed unsolvable before becomes solvable now, most of the time, that’s not because there was some problem with old hardware that made the problem unsolvable – it’s because people have figured out how to write software that solves the problem. In fact, a lot of recent innovations in hardware became possible not because of some fundamental change in the hardware, but because people worked out clever software to help design and lay out circuits on silicon.<\/p>\n
To take one example that’s very familiar to me (because my wife is one of the technical leads of the project), consider IBM’s Watson – the computer that beat the two best human Jepoardy players. IBM has stressed, over and over again, that Watson was a cluster of machines built on IBM’s Power architecture. But the only reason that they used Power was marketing. What made Watson special was that a team of brilliant researchers solved a very hard problem with clever software<\/em>. Watson wasn’t<\/em> a supercomputer. It was a cluster of off-the-shelf hardware. It could easily have been built from a collection of ultra-cheap PC motherboards stacked together with a high-speed network. The only thing that made Watson special – the thing that made Watson possible<\/em> had nothing to do with hardware. It’s just a bunch of cleverly-coded software. That’s it.<\/p>\n To get even closer to home: I work on software<\/em> that lets Twitter run its system on a cluster of thousands and thousands of cheap machines. The hardware is really unimpressive, except for its volume. It’s a ton of cheap PC motherboards, mounted in rack after rack, with network cables connecting the racks. Google has the same thing, but with even more machines. Amazon has the same thing, except that they might even have more machines that Google! If you handed me a ton of money, I – an idiot when it comes to hardware – could build a datacenter like Twitter’s. It would be a huge amount of work – but there’d be nothing inventive about building a new cluster. In fact, that’s the whole point of cluster-based computing: it’s both cheaper and easier to just buy a couple of thousand cheap machines, and distribute your work among them than it is to buy and program one huge machine capable of doing it all by itself.<\/p>\n What makes those clusters special isn’t the hardware. It’s all software. How do you take a thousand, or ten thousand, or a hundred thousand, or a million computers, and make them useful? With software<\/em>. It’s just clever software – two systems, called Mesos and Aurora, which take that collection of thousands upon thousands of machines, and turn it into something that we can easily program, and easily share between thousands of different programs all running on it.<\/p>\n That doesn’t take away from the accomplishment. It just puts the focus where it belongs. “Clever software” isn’t some kind of trick. It’s the product of hard work, innovation, and creativity. It’s where many – or even most – of the big technological advances that we’re watching today are coming from. Innovation and advance aren’t just something that happens in hardware.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’m a bit late to the party on this, but hey, such is life! I work on infrastructure at Twitter, and we’ve been going crazy trying to get stuff deployed in time to be ready for the world cup. So I haven’t had time to write before now! Anyway, late last week, a professor known […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Innovation isn't just hardware! http:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-Ml","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-Ml","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2997"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2998,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2997\/revisions\/2998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}