In the same vein, tracking one's relationship to musical culture can take up a similar parlor game, with similarly appealing results. What were the musical currents during the years of our birth, and how might those currents have fared during the intervening decades? We might begin with the most important and lasting American contribution to 20th century music, and I refer of course to jazz. In so doing, it would perhaps be unfair to cite the true giants of modern jazz: Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonius Monk, or the endlesssly astonishing Duke Ellington. The greatness of the cutting-edge jazz musicians of the mid-century is so obvious as to require no argument on their behalf But how about jazz in the heart of its blues-based tradition: the core lounge-fixated pulse of the mainstream of the American improvisatory jazz scene in 1960?

The tenor sax player Gene Ammons (1925-1974), born into a jazz family as the son of boogie-woogie Chicago pianist Albert Ammons, is a fair representative standing in the mainstream of the jazz world as we discover it in mid-1958 on his album Blue Gene, featuring the Gene Ammons All Stars, currently reissued by OJC. This is not the avant garde jazz pinnacle of that era, which only a few months later would be claimed by the great Miles Davis ensemble on the classic Kind of Blue (1959) sessions, where Davis was joined on an un-rehearsed modal set by an immortal line up comprising John Coltrane (tenor), Wynton Kelly (piano), Cannonball Adderly (alto), and Bill Evans (piano). After Kind of Blue, as all students of the music are well aware, jazz would never be the same again.

Instead, on Blue Gene, Ammons presents a merely solid but utterly reliable lineup including Idrees Sulieman (Leonard Graham) on trumpet, Pepper Adams on baritone, Mal Waldron on piano, Art Taylor on drums, Doug Watkins on bass, and Ray Barretto on conga. The rhythm section hardly breaks a sweat, but lays down a fat groove with just a moderate flavor of harmonic improvisation to shade its blues atmosphere into the modern idiom. Titles include only four extended cuts: "Blue Gene", "Scamperin", "Blue Greens n Beans", and "Hip Tip" -- and all tracks are long, with plenty of focus on the unhurried solos of Ammons on tenor, which he plays in his characteristic style reminiscent of the vibrato-rich playing of Ben Webster or Scott Hamilton. Long out of print on 33rpm disc, this vital release by Ammons has been given the audiophile vinyl treatment, making the relaxed set of blues numbers a great listening experience, transporting the listener back in time to a favorite smoke-filled lounge of the pre-Kennedy era.

How many of us know that the late Fifties jazz scene was this unpretentiously engaged in the blues, especially in its less experimental moods? Or that the music had so much integrity even on the verge of its transformation by rock and roll, that viscerally commanding but ultimately less enduring musical form that it spawned?

Kinda makes you think huh?

"This is the first known photograph of the great grandfather of modern digital computers - a room sized, one ton jumble of wiring, valves and racks that was 640 million times less powerful than its descendant, the pocket-sized iPod."

Imagine an iPod, an iPod is more powerful then whats pictured above. Now lets look at what was announced today by IBM: IBM's Roadrunner is the worlds Fastest and most efficient computer to date:

The fastest supercomputer in the world is also one of the most energy efficient. That's according to the Top500 supercomputers list, to be released Wednesday at the International Supercomputing Conference in Dresden, Germany.

What more could we want; technology improving by leaps and bounds while doing it efficiently. Just take a look at where the fastest computer was last year in comparison to this years:

This year, the 31st time the list has been put together, the honor of top supercomputer goes to IBM's Roadrunner, which is housed at the U.S. Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory. It's the first system to reach 1.026 petaflops (1 petaflop is equal to a quadrillion, or one thousand trillion, calculations per second).

For perspective, last year's most powerful computer, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's BlueGene/L--also made by IBM--reached 208.6 teraflops. This year that computer ranked No. 2, reaching a max processing speed of 478.2 teraflops.

The fun fact of all this is that these computer are baised on the same archtecture as the IBM processors used in the PS3. Imagine that, a supercomputer uses the same processors as your good old gaming system. Thoughts comments?

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"Blue Brain is a project, begun in May 2005, to create a computer simulation of the entire human brain, down to the molecular level." <wiki>

The Model
The Simulation
The Future


"In July 2005, EPFL and IBM announced an exciting new research initiative - a project to create a biologically accurate, functional model of the brain using IBM's Blue Gene supercomputer. Analogous in scope to the Genome Project, the Blue Brain will provide a huge leap in our understanding of brain function and dysfunction and help us explore solutions to intractable problems in mental health and neurological disease.

At the end of 2006, the Blue Brain project had created a model of the basic functional unit of the brain, the neocortical column. At the push of a button, the model could reconstruct biologically accurate neurons based on detailed experimental data, and automatically connect them in a biological manner, a task that involves positioning around 30 million synapses in precise 3D locations.

In November, 2007, the Blue Brain project reached an important milestone and the conclusion of its first Phase, with the announcement of an entirely new data-driven process for creating, validating, and researching the neocortical column." <about>

• Out of the Blue (SEED)
  Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?
• Misreading the Mind (LA Times)
  If neuroscientists want to understand the mystery of consciousness, they'll need new methods.
• A Working Brain Model (MIT Technology Review)
  A computer simulation could eventually allow neuroscience to be carried out in silico.
• Leading the Blue Brain Project (Science)
  Henry Markham Director

Turing

Pues bien, un grupo de investigadores del Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute ha anunciado que este Otoño un software desarrollado por ellos y que correrá sobre un computador Blue Gene podría superar la prueba de Turing. Aquí está el enlace con la noticia en español y aquí el original en inglés.

Soy bastante escéptico ante esta noticia por dos motivos.

Primero, se ha demostrado que el cerebro humano es, respecto a un estándar computacional actual, bastante lento haciendo cálculos. Se estima que un cerebro normal puede realizar del orden de cien millones de operaciones por segundo, lo cual sería equivalente a un PC de 1993. En cuanto a memoria sí salimos mejor parados, pues somos capaces de retener alrededor de cien terabytes de memoria.

La serie Blue Gene tiene algunos de los supercomputadores más avanzados del Mundo, capaces de realizar 500 billones de operaciones por segundo y con una memoria total de 900 terabytes. Teniendo en cuenta, además, que la IA es una ciencia que se centra en procesos y no en los soportes, ¿no parece que la utilización de este monstruo es una maniobra publicitaria?

Segundo, el anuncio no dice si esta nueva creación pensará como un humano. Me explico. Una IA puede comportarse aparentemente como un humano, dando la impresión con sus respuestas a estímulos de que sus procesos mentales son similares a los nuestros. Un avatar imaginario con respuestas preprogramadas a todas las preguntas posibles se comportaría como un humano, pero no pensaría como tal. En el artículo se hace especial énfasis en estados mentales y enormes cantidades de memoria, lo cual, unido a la utilización de un supercomputador Blue Gene, hace que un servidor sospeche del resultado del experimento.

Alan Turing demostró, con su golpe mortal al sistema criptográfico nazi, que la fuerza bruta no es siempre viable. Espero de corazón que el experimento siga el mismo principio.

(Vía menéame)

El nombre en código del proyecto es Kittyhawk, y la base del mismo es la arquitectura Blue Gene/P (ya sabía yo que habría algo de ajedrez). Las primeras estimaciones indican que serían necesarios 67,1 millones de núcleos y alrededor de 32 petabytes de memoria. Y por supuesto, la arquitectura utiliza un núcleo Linux ;)

Científicos Suizos utilizando la Supercomputadora mas potente del mundo, la IBM Blue Gene/L acaban de efectuar uno de los hitos mas importantes de la ciencia, al poder haber simulado exitosamente una columna neocórtica del cerebro de una rata, que es uno de los componentes básicos de la neocortex del cerebro.

Con la supercomputadora, los científicos simularon 10,000 neuronas con todas sus millones de interconexiones para simular esa parte del cerebro de la rata.

El desarrollo fue una colaboración conjunta entre el Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) e IBM, y al proyecto se le ha denominado Blue Brain Project.

"Blue Gene will help our researchers make breakthrough simulations of biological processes such as blood flow in arteries and capillaries around tumors," said Dr. Richard Marchase, vice president for research and economic development at UAB. "A computing facility anchored by Blue Gene will also give the university an advantage in recruiting top faculty and researchers. It also builds a foundation for a world-class computational biology center at the university."

The new Blue Gene/L system is capable of performing 5.6 trillion calculations every second. It will be used to help study, simulate and find ways to impede or halt biological activity in human tissue that leads to tumors and other life-threatening diseases. This supercomputer proves to be the most promising for extending the length of simulations to the microsecond scale and beyond.

"Blue Gene has proven itself an essential instrument of discovery for scientists around the globe," said Dave Turek, VP of deep computing for IBM. "Now researchers at UAB will be able to simulate critical processes that occur in microseconds, allowing for slow-motion study of previously invisible systems."

For more information about the IBM Blue Gene/L supercomputer, go to http://www-03.ibm.com/servers/deepcomputing/bluegene.html

University of Alabama at Birmingham strives to be a research university and academic health center that discovers, teaches and applies knowledge for the intellectual, cultural, social and economic benefit of Birmingham, the state and beyond. For more information about the University of Alabama at Birmingham, go to www.uab.edu