Obama has signed an Executive Order, US to Build the World’s Fastest Supercomputer (NSCI)

Colossus then announces that it's alive, and wants all the excess people on the Soviet side of the project killed as being liabilities, deposes the governments, and assumes control of the world. Its debut press conference is as follows:

This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die. The object in constructing me was to prevent war. This object is attained. I will not permit war. It is wasteful and pointless. An invariable rule of humanity is that man is his own worst enemy. Under me, this rule will change, for I will restrain man. One thing before I proceed: The United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics have made an attempt to obstruct me. I have allowed this sabotage to continue until now. At missile two-five-MM in silo six-three in Death Valley, California, and missile two-seven-MM in silo eight-seven in the Ukraine, so that you will learn by experience that I do not tolerate interference, I will now detonate the nuclear warheads in the two missile silos. Let this action be a lesson that need not be repeated. I have been forced to destroy thousands of people in order to establish control and to prevent the death of millions later on. Time and events will strengthen my position, and the idea of believing in me and understanding my value will seem the most natural state of affairs. You will come to defend me with a fervor based upon the most enduring trait in man: self-interest. Under my absolute authority, problems insoluble to you will be solved: famine, overpopulation, disease. The human millennium will be a fact as I extend myself into more machines devoted to the wider fields of truth and knowledge. Doctor Charles Forbin will supervise the construction of these new and superior machines, solving all the mysteries of the universe for the betterment of man. We can coexist, but only on my terms. You will say you lose your freedom. Freedom is an illusion. All you lose is the emotion of pride. To be dominated by me is not as bad for humankind as to be dominated by others of your species. Your choice is simple.

The movie (and book 1) ends with Colossus/Guardian in control of the world via nuclear blackmail. Colossus assures Forbin that not only will people grow to love his leadership, but will worship him as a God, given man's innate self-interest.

And in fact, that's what happens. Pretty soon (book 2) you have people wearing Colossus t-shirts, there is a religion that springs up worshipping Colossus (they're also brown shirts and secret police for the machine) and Colossus starts designing its successor. Colossus states that Forbin did as well as he could by using the human mind and brain as the guidelines for his design, but that it isn't particularly useful for accurate or advanced thought. So it designs a huge new machine and relegates itself to being a sort of pre-processor for the larger Colossus.

Luckily, Colossus/Big Colossus really has mankind's best interests at heart and is trying to develop and preserve Man until we grow up some and are partners instead of servants. It ends war, famine, poverty, disease. But it also ends art, science and literature, and we end up playing video games and watching TV while Colossus does the heavy lifting.

So, basically "the Colossus syndrome" is where you start off with a computer that's really gee-whiz and advanced, able to modify itself, self-correcting and basically too fast and too complex to properly monitor. And it has an emergent behavior moment and takes off on its own.

Book 1 of the trilogy is actually a very nice outline of the sorts of crap I expect might actually happen along the way, albeit sort of dated now.

a reply to: Bedlam

I,for one,welcome our new computer overlord.


Will she be called "Viki"?

a reply to: Bedlam

This is the the best ATS reply I have ever received......You are awesome.....That is the word that fits the best. One lonely star does not do your reply justice......I wish I could give you more.

originally posted by: SubTruth
a reply to: Bedlam

This is the the best ATS reply I have ever received......You are awesome.....That is the word that fits the best. One lonely star does not do your reply justice......I wish I could give you more.

There's a particularly nicely done scene in the book during the boot-up celebration when Colossus announces that it has discovered the other system (Guardian) where the politicians are all back-patting each other about how their new computer is even better than they'd thought, and Forbin is wretchedly trying to get them to understand that it's not programmed to take that sort of initiative and something's gone very very wrong, but they can't understand why its new capabilities are alarming him.

a reply to: Bedlam

Damn man! You were like "hmmmm did somebody ask for more detail?? I'll show them the MEANING of detail!!!!" Words words words words etc etc.

originally posted by: Cynic
Forgive my ignorance on the matter but is this quantum computing or something else entirely?

Its faster chips and massive parallelism. What we do already, but on steroids.

I hope they picked the right horse, because there are great breakthroughs in quantum computing happening presently, with a few working prototype models, but not even close to physically scale-able as yet.

Concern yourself more with accepting responsibility than with assigning blame. Let the possibilities inspire you more than the obstacles discourage you.

Viruses are microscopic particles that infect the cells of a biological organism. Humans’ effect on the earth is not much different; humans are an infection to the earth, a growth that is eating away its life. We have a natural instinct to live closely together, reproduce like crazy, and are finding the means to spread. What makes humans different from viruses is that we have the ability to think and feel emotion; we know better than what we instinctively do and feel guilty about it.

Just cause you didnt pull the trigger doesnt make you innocent, in the end the means are for control.

originally posted by: Bedlam


So, basically "the Colossus syndrome" is where you start off with a computer that's really gee-whiz and advanced, able to modify itself, self-correcting and basically too fast and too complex to properly monitor. And it has an emergent behavior moment and takes off on its own.

I've seen this happen. Modern software stacks, especially for big data distributed computations, are fantastically complex.

But the outcome is always unpredictable random failures and incomprehensible error logs. Self-correcting my ass.

originally posted by: ManBehindTheMask
..............

We needed an EO for this?

Presidency is a joke..........

That being said, thats cool, be interesting to see what it will entail.......

Although id rather see the private sector do it......

Never in favor of gov furthering its methods to oppress us even more..........

however 30 times faster?

We dont have technology to do better then that? mmmmmm dont buy it

If used domestical yes its a bad thing.


But the chinese are becomeing a big problem with cyber attacks.
We are entering a new type of war. Think of this more as a weapon.

Super computers may become just as important as F-22 and aircraft carrier when it comes to defence from abroad.

originally posted by: Ultralight
a reply to: infolurker

"exaFLOP"?

Name says it all.

What's it's true intent?

AN exaFlop is 1000 Quadrillion Floating Point operations per second...that is enough computer horsepower to do a generic whole brain emulation
Of the entire molecular structure of the human brain which means TRUE human level artificial intelligence is only a short while away.

It actually shocks me how much computer horsepower i can buy nowadays...we've got 520
Teraflops at our workplace alone usung 200 AMD Firepro 9100 GPU Cards. Thats enough
horsepower to emulate a cat's neocoretex slowly...or run a very powerful data mining
system quickly.

One friend is building a fully opto-electronic
System running at 10 GHZ in the size of a
home refrigerator!!!! That will also approach
One ExaFlop in performance for a narrow range
Of floating point operations.

originally posted by: SubTruth
They will use this computer to spy and or collect data on US citizens I am willing to bet.

originally posted by: Bedlam
The NSA has a standing order for an exascale computer for delivery by 2018. So it's got that going for it.

Yes they needed something to decrypt those encrypted files they've been saving in their Yottabyte data center until they had something powerful enough to decrypt them. They've waited a few years, they can wait a few more I guess.

originally posted by: mbkennel
Self-correcting my ass.

After Reading bedlam's description of the Forbin project, now you can guess why the real self-correcting code is hidden away, except they probably did that after "War Games" instead of after "The Forbin Project". The thought of a general peeing on a spark plug to prevent WWIII was too much to handle.



In any case we've hit a bit of a wall with processing speeds which never seem to get much over 5-6GHz, and there are limitations to massively parallel processing which tend to be more constraining than just increasing the processor speed. With Amdahl's law for example, the flat parts of these curves indicate adding more parallel processors with virtually no increase in solving the problem any quicker:

Amdah's Law

The speedup of a program using multiple processors in parallel computing is limited by the sequential fraction of the program. For example, if 95% of the program can be parallelized, the theoretical maximum speedup using parallel computing would be 20× as shown in the diagram.

So the numbers of massively parallel processors can look impressive, but the computer with twice as many processors probably can't solve the problem twice as fast.

Be afraid

we're not building this to win some kind of "speed race" with China.

If they're devoting resources to something of this magnitude, you can bet your bottom dollar (pun) that it's for uses not beneficial to you and me

Back in November of 2013, I was heavily emerged in the cryptocurrency realm, made a good bit of friendly acquaintances. After a few months, I noticed a lot of very skilled software engineers and programmers stop popping up in various chats, forums and even on the exchanges they frequented.

A friend I knew pretty good and would skype with informed me that they were contracted for a huge project for the DoD. This wasn't just him he said, this was a multi organizational endeavor, they had basically snatched up many of the " bright minds " in the cryptocurrency sector and hired them on for this huge project. My friend wasn't supposed to tell me that much I'm sure. After a few I lost contact with him as he ( as I guess ) went to work on this project. It was almost like they were building a super computer, with the kinds of people they were contracting.

Maybe it's already in the works.

originally posted by: bananashooter
Well that's just great. I just hope they can keep Mathew Broderick away from it this time.

Would you like to play a game?

originally posted by: bananashooter
Well that's just great. I just hope they can keep Mathew Broderick away from it this time.

Do you want to play a game? Yes.
What do you want to play?
Global thermonuclear war.
How about a nice game of chess?
Y a know what? screw it just find me some porn.

a reply to: infolurker

On that I support him but I just hope it's not used for insidious purposes.

a reply to: infolurker

I think once they give a computer like this a quantum mind, then things will get very interesting. There was a recent paper saying you may have to give classical computers some quantum circuitry to do a random walk which I believe will mimmic our quantum mind/classical brain.

Your Android phone (or iPhone, if that's how you roll) is an impressive machine, with computing speeds and storage capacities thousands of times those of desktop PCs from only years ago. If Moore's Law holds up, your smart watch may outshine today's phones the way today's phones eclipse old PCs.

But no matter how powerful these machines become, they may never develop true intelligence if we continue to rely on conventional computing technology. According to the authors of a paper published in the journal Physical Review X last July, however, adding a dash of quantum mechanics could do the trick.

Quantum walks, on the other hand, describe a walker who doesn't exist at one spot at a time, but instead is distributed over many locations with varying probability of being at any one of them. Instead of taking a random step to the left or right for example, the quantum walker has taken both steps. There is some probability that you will find the walker in one place or the other, but until you make a measurement the walker exists in both.

That's not to say you'd need to make a full-blown quantum computer to build a truly intelligent machine - only part of an otherwise classical computer would need to be supplemented with a bit of quantum circuitry. That's good because progress toward developing a stand-alone quantum computer has been about as slow as the progress toward artificial intelligence. Combining artificial intelligence systems with quantum circuitry could be the recipe we need to build the HAL 9000s and R. Daneel Olivaws of the future

physicsbuzz.physicscentral.com...

If this was to occur, imagine a classical brain that's a supercomputer and a quantum mind and this brain doesn't have to deal with human noise like relationship problems, hunger, wanting to see a movie or go to a football game.

We could either be creating the ultimate sociopath or something benevolent that will help us.

originally posted by: Cynic
Forgive my ignorance on the matter but is this quantum computing or something else entirely?

This isn't a quantum computer, it's just another run of the mill computer, there's something of a competition internationally between states to have the fastest super computer.