The World of Peter J Bentley

Systemic computer or Skynet?

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 05:47:25 GMT

Below I mentioned that my systemic computer was featured in a New Scientist article. Since then, the work has been picked up worldwide and has appeared in many surprising places. Many thanks for the interest! Some of the other articles have included, erm... some interesting claims. Just to clarify: the systemic computer can repair its damaged code. It is not a PC, although it has been simulated by a PC and a Mac. It is not a new operating system, it is an entirely new computer architecture which runs code on bare metal (no operating system). The FPGA is not a resource manager - we used it to implement the entire computer plus a conventional co-processor. It does not use Chaos Theory. It does not detect overheating. It does not run Ms Windows or Max OS X or any operating system. Oh, and it's not Skynet. Not yet anyway!

Here are just a few of the other articles about the work. I got to page 10 in Google and gave up. I know there are many, many more out there. Thanks for going to so much trouble, folks.

Wired.co.uk No more blue screen of death with crash-proof computer

Wall Street Journal tech blog The Self-Repairing Computer That Never Crashes

Phys.org Researchers build self-repairing "systemic" computer (Also reported in eScience News, feedstory.net)

ZeeNews Now a Computer that Heals Itself(Also in The Times of India, truthdive.com, aninews.com, RupeeRains News, penmai.com, socialmediablazer.com)

pcworld.com Crash-proof computer tactic revealed by UK researchers (also reproduced in computerworld.co.nz)

pcpro.com Crash-proof computer created by London researchers

Hexus.net The "systemic computer" that repairs itself and never crashes

Slashgear.com Systemic computer can rebuild corrupted data and never crashes (also reproduced in techinvestornews.com)

digitaltrends.com Scientists design crash-proof computer based on nature’s chaos

extremetech.com Researchers create crash- proof, self-repairing, inspired-by-nature computer

kitguru.net How to build a PC that never crashes

venturebeat.com Scientists invent a self-repairing computer that will never crash (also in ebests.com, gamespasm.com)

techspot.com Scientists develop computer that never crashes

ubergizmo.com Computer That Never Crashes Mimics Biology

gizmodo.com Scientists Claim They’ve Built a Computer That Never Crashes

IT News Today Found a way to rid computer of lockups and crashes

Systemic Computer in New Scientist

Fri, 15 Feb 2013 07:08:36 GMT

We've been working on my systemic computer for several years but it's only now that we have a working hardware version, thanks to my talented EngD student Christos Sakellariou.

The computer is a result of more than a decade of research into modelling natural processes using conventional computers (processes such as evolution, brains, ecosystems, etc). The models were usually very slow and I realised that our conventional computers have a very different way of processing information compared to all natural systems. For example, our brain has billions of neurons, many of which can fire at the same time. This means information is processed in parallel, distributed across the whole brain. In conventional computers, only one (or very few) instructions are followed at the same time, memory is centralised, and so although they do things very fast, they are still very slow compared to our brains. The other problem is failure - a centralised architecture will fail as soon as one component fails. In our brain we lose neurons every day but we're fine - our brains have the redundancy to cope and the ability to reconfigure themselves to make use of what is left. So I decided I wanted to build a computer that worked more like a brain. The result is the systemic computer. It processes information in parallel and it can reconfigure itself if it gets damaged.

We're still working on it, and you can read more about the systemic computer here. However, we're very pleased to have a lead technology story in New Scientist today! Not only that, but the story was the most read on the New Scientist website . Thanks to Paul Marks for the article.

iStethoscope Pro helps to save the life of a baby

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 12:00:00 GMT

For those of you who follow the support blog of iStethoscope Pro you may have already seen this message. In case you haven't, I thought I would place a copy here. It's an amazing story left by one of the users of my app. Many thanks for sharing the story, Sara.

I want to share my story with you. My husband and I are both RN's. So of course we have our own top of the line stethescopes. I found your app and thought it would be fun to have on my iphone. I was pregnant with our third little girl and thought I could use it to listen to her heartbeat. When I was 7 months pregnant she had decreased movements. I was concerned and tried using my stethescope to try a hear her heartbeat. I couldnt hear anything so I got the istethesope app out and was able to hear her heartbeat. Being a nurse I knew that it should be much faster than our so I was not concerned with the rate. I was more relieved that she still had a hearbeat. This was on the 4th of July. So the next day I call my OB and went in to have her checked out since she still was not moving. After the doctor listed to hear heartbeat with the ultra sound machine I was sent to the hospital. She was in distress. Her heart rate was well over 260. When I told them I had used your app to listen to her heartbeat the day before they did not believe that it worked. I was able to tell them that the rate was the same as what I heard the day before. So they were able to determine she was had been in heart failure since at least the day before. I was flown by helicopter to San Franciso where she was born by emergency C section. She was resusitated several times in the first 24 hours of her life. The doctors werent sure she would make it. But I had faith and knew God would answer my prayers. She was in the NICU for 4 weeks and came home a few days after her due date. I am happy to report she is now 18 months old and has been off heart medications for one year. She is truly a miracle and has no long term effects from her traumatic birth. Now all my friends have gotten the App you created as well as many of the nurses who took care of us. I want to say thank you for creating this App. It played a large role in saving the life of my little miracle, Emily.

TEDxBermuda

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 03:13:05 GMT

I was lucky enough to be invited to speak at TEDxBermuda in October. It was a very interesting experience, with other speakers including John Sculley of Pepsi and Apple fame. I was the first speaker, and as I joked at the time, if anything was likely to go wrong, it would happen to me... And of course it did - my videos were accidentally shuffled by the tech people with the result that most would no longer play. I was forced to improvise - luckily I can be quite quick on my feet. The bonus was that I've never had so many compliments for a talk afterwards! The video is now available online (and has been edited to put back the videos that were missing on the day). Both before and after the event we were treated to nice receptions and dinners so all in all it was a great time. My thanks again to the organisers for inviting me. You can see the video here.

Digitized in a bestseller list

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 07:04:25 GMT

My new book Digitized continues to gain nice reviews in the media and I've recently been informed that we've made a bestseller list in USA, as reported by Library Journal Reviews. We may not be able to beat the book on Steve Jobs, but I'm happy being at number 5 nevertheless!

SIGEVO article on AppEco

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 07:04:25 GMT

I've been working with Soo Ling Lim recently on a computational model of the App Store. It's partly made possible by my experiences with the app iStethoscope Pro which has produced a lot of fascinating data. The work has just been featured in a magazine called SIGEVO, with the front cover showing one of our viral networks, see below. We're continuing the work by interviewing large numbers of people about their usage of App Stores. Please fill in the survey here and we will use your information to make our model even more accurate: http://tinyurl.com/mobi-user

Digitized 10 out of 10 for BCS

Wed, 01 Aug 2012 07:04:25 GMT

It's not often authors get unequivocally glowing reviews for their books, but I'm very pleased to say that the British Computer Society seems to have written such a review for my new book Digitized. Ten out of ten! I am greatly flattered, many thanks!

Peter's TEDxUCL talk

Mon, 09 Jul 2012 03:58:07 GMT

On Sunday 3 June I participated in the first TEDxUCL event. There were a range of talks on a diverse variety of topics. I was allocated one of the longest slots and made use of the time to talk about some of the ideas in my research I've been developing for some years. During the first part of the talk I also performed a rather physical demonstration of the brittleness of current technology by hammering a nail through a laptop. The gasps of the audience were quite amusing.

The video has now been made available so you can watch the full talk here. I called it The Sound of Numbers Crunching.

You can also see a range of photos from the event online here.

The twitter response was so funny - particularly when I hammered a nail through a laptop live on stage - that I took a few snapshots of it, below:

Encyclopaedia Britannica Blog: Five Questions

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 11:19:23 GMT

All this blogging is quite unusual for me! Not long ago I was interviewed by the Encyclopaedia Britannica Blog folks so an article could be produced. It also reviews my recent book Digitized. I quite enjoyed these questions - a little different from the norm. You can read the article here.

US OUP Blog - Maurice Wilkes on Alan Turing

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 11:11:05 GMT

I was asked a few weeks ago to write an article for the US Oxford's OUPblog. They're running a sequence of entries from authors about Turing to celebrate 100 years since Alan Turing was born. Having written Digitized recently, which includes the stories of many pioneers of computing, not just Turing, I thought it might be fun to illustrate some of the views of Turing's contemporaries. So I wrote this slightly controversial blog entry for them... Enjoy!