Europe's Got Talent For Geeks

The Graphene one. The others are just the usual BS from people clueless about how computers work and what they can and cannot do.

Spoken like a true programmer or sysadmin with no knowledge of statistics, modelling, machine learning or data analysis. I know, because I was one (and I still write code and maintain servers). But I've also moved into the above fields, and it's a completely different world. The discrete math and logic you use in programming are completely useless here, and the things you can do and the hurdles you come across are very different from the ones you see in programming. Of course, you still have to implement your models and analyses, and you get all the usual issues there (plus things like numerical instability), but even if the software is running fine you'll have things like parameter identifiability, difficulties in comparing models, lack of data in the places where you need it, conceptual problems with the models that can only be solved by making them more complex, which leads to lack of data problems and the need for massive amounts of compute power, and so on. These are the things they will be trying to tackle, and they have nothing to do with the limitations of Turing-style computers.

I do remain sceptical about having a chat with a Turing-level AI any time soon, but data analysis, modelling and inference methods are getting better and better (see Google Search, Watson) and I don't think that continued research into these things is a waste of money. Neither do Google, Facebook, Microsoft, the US government, and the EU apparently.

Finally, here's another EU project [futurict.eu] in this direction that is both scary and interesting.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/qB_EdH4CBjw/story01.htm

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