Unit 1 - Moore's Law and digitisation

Question 1

What are some of the reasons for increased computing power?

Answer 1

• It is possible to print integrated circuits at the scale of a single atom in a silicon crystal
• Supercomputers now require a fraction of the energy of the earliest ones
• Speed of calculation and download speeds vastly increased
• Cost of hard drive has reduced relative to the amount of data stored

Question 2

What has increased at roughly a factor of two per year?

Answer 2

The complexity for minimum circuit costs.

I.e. Amount of integrated circuit computing power bought for one dollar

Question 3

What are the two reasons the computer industry has kept up such rapid improvement?

Answer 3

1) Digital constraints are a lot looser than things constrained by the laws of physics. They depend on how many electrons per second can be passed through a channel etched in integrated circuit, or speed of light down fibre optic cable.
2) Brilliant Tinkering - finding engineering detours around physics roadblocks. E.g. Stacking integrated circuits when space became too cramped.

Question 4

What is logarithmic spacing in a graph?

Answer 4

Each segment of vertical axis represents x-fold growth.

They then show exponential growth as a perfectly straight line.

Question 5

What other functions have moved from analog to digital?

Answer 5

• Sensors
• Microphones
• Cameras
• Accelerometers

Question 6

What is an exception to the exponential growth in technology?

Answer 6

Batteries - they are essentially chemical not digital devices

Question 7

What is SLAM?

Answer 7

Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping.

Building a map of unfamiliar buildings as navigating through it.

Question 8

What is SIGGRAPH?

Answer 8

The Association of Computing Machinery’s ‘Special Interest Group on Graphics and Interactive Technologies’

Question 9

What is ‘SDK’?

Answer 9

Software Development Kit

This gives programmers everything they need to start writing PC software making use of a device.

Question 10

What are some of the essential components of some of the science-fiction technologies?

Answer 10

Cheap and powerful digital sensors.

Question 11

What is a ‘Cyclopean LIDAR’?

Answer 11

Combination of LIght and raDAR assembly mounted on roof of a vehicle for self-driving cars.

Contains 64 separate laser beams and an equal number of detectors.

Question 12

Why is exponential growth so difficult to comprehend?

Answer 12

Because in a relatively short time the numbers become far greater than we can understand and visualise.

This starts to happen on the second half of the chessboard.

Question 13

What examples are there of a mainstream product having equivalent power to a supercomputer?

Answer 13

1) ASCI Red 2 (1996) supercomputer had same peak calculation speeds as PlayStation 3 (2006).
2) Cray-2 supercomputer (1985) had same as iPad 2 tablet (2011), but the tablet also had speaker, microphone, headphone jack and two cameras.

Question 14

What is Kinect?

Answer 14

A sensing device used with Microsoft Xbox gaming device.

It tracks the movements of two active players and can predict where one player is when another obscures their position.

Question 15

How do SLAM and Kinect connect?

Answer 15

Kinect solved the problem of SLAM.

A key part of this was Microsoft allowing others to develop it’s software.

Question 16

What are two important properties of digitised content?

Answer 16

1) Information is non-rival. Many people can access the same info at the same time.
2) Information is cheaply reproducible.

N.B. Not the same as cheaply generated - some (such as movies) can be very expensive to generate. Free content can be used into marketable digital products. E.g. Crowd-sourced info on weather or traffic

Question 17

What aspects of digitisation are distinctive of the business model commonly seen in online commerce today?

Answer 17

• Cheap reproduction
• Content give-aways
• Refinement of digital content on the basis of crowd-sourcing or personalisation.

Question 18

What do economists call a network effect?

Answer 18

When something becomes more valuable to its users the more users there are.

Question 19

What are the distinctive features of Waze, when compared with other products that give directions to drivers?

Answer 19

Waze plots a route relative to real-time information about traffic conditions transmitted by the phones of other users

Question 20

What made Waze possible?

Answer 20

Exponential technological progress leading to vast numbers of cheap devices, each equipped with an array of sensors, processors and transmitters.

Question 21

What does Waze bring together?

Answer 21

• Digitised street maps
• GPS location coordinate for cars using the app
• Social info, incl alerts about traffic jams, speed traps, cheap gas
• Sensor data, converting every user into a traffic-speed sensor

Question 22

What are ‘Rival goods’?

Answer 22

Can only be consumed by one person or thing at a time

Question 23

What is ‘Zero marginal cost of reproduction’?

Answer 23

Whilst first copy might cost a lot to make, additional copies cost almost nothing

Question 24

What are advantages of goods made of bits over atoms?

Answer 24

Can be replicated perfectly and sent across the room or planet almost instantaneously and almost costlessly

Question 25

How do digital translation services work?

Answer 25

They do statistical pattern matching over huge pools of digital content that was costly to produce, but cheap to reproduce.

E.g. Referencing EU official documents produced in all main languages of member countries

Question 26

What is M2M?

Answer 26

Machine to machine. Communication between devices, such as Waze; ATMs; digital thermometers in refrigerator trucks; Kayak’s servers contact airlines, who respond with no human intervention

Question 27

What problems of measurement are being generated by the data explosion?

Answer 27

So much data being stored and transferred means we’re running out of vocabulary for counting the number of bits

Question 28

What can use of Google search terms help predict for the future?

Answer 28

• Searches for real estate agents correlated with increases in sales and prices
• Searches for medicines or information about symptoms correlated with illnesses subsequently recorded by public health