capped
I WAS IN THE FUTURE, IT WAS TOO LATE TO RSVP
Member # 709
posted
i carried it to school in my pocket. and any calculator can do the calculations.. the only problem is that things like that need to be programmed to do things sequentially, by humans. I doubt that any computer in the next 100 years will actually think on its own. Computers need humans to unplug them when they are stupid, to use them to make images depicting how cats breath smells like cat food, et cetera. Maybe a computer could design a FTL drive.. but it would need you to tell it to start doing so.
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Registered: Sep 2001
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posted
Matrix: The reason he called it a pocket calculator is because you said "a computer program that could do calculations in an instant". And a pocket calculator does that. You didn't say what kind of calculations.
And of course we'll be "sitting on the sidelines watching". That's the reason we have computers. Do you realize how complicated the calculations that are done these days are? If all the scientists had to work them out by hand, we'd never get anywhere (not to mention we'd completely deforest the planet to get all the pencils and paper they'd need. We have computers so we can feed the information into them, and then we can sit back and wait for them to give us the result, in a much much much shorter time than it would take, otherwise.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Computers would still need human input- to design the programs that enable them to do FTL calculations etc. Unless we can come up with something along the lines of Data humans will always be a vital part of a computers operation. Not to mention how often the damn things go wrong and need- you guessed it- humans to fix 'em.
-------------------- "I am an almost extinct breed, an old-fashioned gentleman, which means I can be a cast-iron son-of-a-bitch when it suits me." --Jubal Harshaw
Registered: Feb 2002
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