Ask HN: Is unconventional computing popular?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1333440

by Agent101 • 16 years ago

14 13 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Are people excited and interested about the possibilities of things like autonomic computing/amorphous computing and other non- Von Neumann style systems?

There seems to be a lack of coverage in geek news, despite a healthy academic community/journal etc and I was wondering why.

I've got my own reasons for not being enthused about the current field, but I am curious what other people think.

adbge• 16 years ago

I, for one, am ridiculously excited by the idea of an entirely new computing paradigm. I know some at HN abhor anything that isn't practical this very second, but I think they just lack imagination. I'd be interested in any articles submitted in the vein of non-traditional computing.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

Plenty of people here are very interested in 'non conventional computing', in fact I've learned more about this from the people here than from any other source on the web.

Here are some searches that you could try:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+p...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+c...

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Anews.ycombinator.com+f...

billswift• 16 years ago

It would be more exciting if there hadn't been so many in the recent past, like quantum computing that's been going to have a practical application Real Soon Now for the past decade.

jacquesm2• 16 years ago

One problem with any new technology is that the 'get rich quick' crowd and their marketeers will jump on it to avoid missing the next possibility to easy riches. They'll over-hype the product, create unrealistic expectations and move on to the next hot thing when they've given it a bad name.

Modern day locusts is what they are.

mkramlich• 16 years ago

Build a widget with it I can buy, or ship a piece of software written in/with it, and I think there will be much more interest it.

kragen3• 16 years ago

Oh, of course I'm excited and interested (although not enough to follow it so closely as to be able to guess what you're de-enthused about) but I think it's still a recondite enough area that most HN readers won't know to upvote it.

Agent1013• 16 years ago

Have a browse through the table of contents of the International Journal and you might get the same impression as me.

http://www.oldcitypublishing.com/IJUC/IJUC.html

Basically it is too unconventional (chemical), faddy and not focussed on producing something usable by the average geek.

That sort of stuff is still interesting (for computing in odd situations) but is not what I am looking for. I suppose I wondering why there isn't the computer equivalent of a space elevator. That is something most people know about that can't be done with current tech but is physically plausible (but might still might be too hard to do). Something that might spark the equivalent of the spaceward foundation, but for computers.

The fleet architecture represents a different face of unconventional computing. One that geeks can get behind. However it concentrates on speed of processing. Looking at the costs of computing, increasing computational power per watt or flops is useful but does not address the dominant cost of owning and running a computer. The dominant costs, I think, are the costs of learning the system, administering them and programming them. This is not addressed by either of the above threads of research.

I have my own odd-ball ideas. Which I'm excited about. I just wanted to gauge opinion of HN type people.

kragen3• 16 years ago

It seems like what you're interested in is more like UI or UX research than hardware innovation? The universality of the machine, strengthened by the ubiquity of compilers and software written in high-level languages, almost totally disconnects the user experience from the computing hardware, except for efficiency differences; instead it's tied to the I/O devices and the user interaction techniques, and increasingly, to the data the user is interacting with.

But I do see a fair bit of discussion of researchy and novel UIs here, don't you? On the front page right now I see Heroku (reducing the cost of administering systems), Hummingbird (real-time web site analytics visualization), Android vs. iPhone (which is largely about ubiquity and UI), Chatroulette, the death of files in the iPhone/iPad UI (which sounds like goes right to the core of the "dominant costs" you're talking about), Nielsen's report on iPad usability, and UI design in Basecamp. And that's just above the fold!

kbob• 16 years ago

How about disappointed? I've seen intriguing non-Von architectures for decades, and they always lose out to Moore's Law and the fact that 1,000X more engineering resources are invested in Von Neumann architectures.

jbarham• 16 years ago

Microcontrollers (e.g., the Atmel AVR chip line which is the basis of the Arduino open source hardware platform) are often modified Harvard architectures, where the instructions are read from flash and SRAM is used for volatile stack/heap memory.

There is a lot of activity in this area which has been dubbed "physical computing". See e.g. O'Reilly's Make quarterly and Sparkfun, which apparently does > $10 million in sales annually from selling electronics components and kits to hobbyists. I'm eagerly awaiting my first Arduino starter kit from them! ;)

Ask HN: Is unconventional computing popular?

Related Stories