Vision is the art of seeing things invisible
- Jonathan Swift
The recent Deep Blue event in New York City gave the world a glimpse of a
vision once held only by scientists, futurists and science fiction writers.
When the IBM supercomputer played and ultimately beat the world's greatest chess
player, it moved tomorrow's vision closer to today's reality.
Certain key events in history have signaled the start of new era. I believe
that in 100 years, people will reflect on the battles between Deep Blue and
Garry Kasparov as true start of the information age. Indeed, to the world at
large, these chess matches marked the first time in history that a computer
appeared to think.
Though artificial intelligence is just at its dawn, the Deep Blue scalable
parallel technology offers a new computing paradigm - combining specialized
software and hardware with general purpose machines to more effectively tackle
complex problems in a variety of fields. This combination, supplemented by
expert by expert human knowledge, will enable users to solve problems that, as
in chess, require evaluation of millions of possibilities.
Imagine the applications - in pharmaceuticals, transportation, financial
services, retail, meteorology, database management, Web site management and
more. A system based on this type of technology could, for instance,
drastically cut AIDS drug development time, bringing drugs to market faster and
at a lower cost. This technology also could help companies sift through huge
databases containing valuable information about sales, products, customers and
competitors. By leveraging massive parallel processing, businesses could run
data mining software to discover hidden relationships in company data,
ultimately transferring that knowledge into a competitive advantage.
This is the world of tomorrow - a world that is partly here today because of
a chess match that captured our imagination, and because of a Research team that
went after a problem of significance. Research is at its best when it attacks
the really big problems, the problems that profoundly affect the world we live
in.
If vision is the art of seeing what's invisible, then weaving tomorrow's
vision into the fabric of today's society represents the passion and energy of
the human mind.
Paul M. Horn
Senior Vice President,
Research
