went ahmedabad baroda and back for GATE. The school had stocious facilities. The exam was supposed to start at 9:30 but we got the ORS sheet at 9:25 only. That too I was the only CS candidate in the whole centre. It was given 10 min late !!!! what man is this supposed to be practise of one of our greatest engineering centers of India.
I feel computing in general needs a paradigm shift. We should rethink about what exactly is a computer and computation. All that we think of is bits and bytes but we dont challenge the basic assumptions. Why is that we should have a binary system? Okay some people may say that electronic circuits can work best if there are only two levels/states. But can we do the same thing using different technology may be optical computing???(that is only stuff that came to my mind) Why is necessary to have the same one CPU, input and output device??? Can we create an array of small size somethings with computation going on in each of them and they synchronize somehow so as to give a coherent, meaningful thing. Please dont think i am talking of many CHIPS (I like that word though) working together....
I was reading a book called 'Sync'. It deals with synchronization amongst animals, insects, brain/heart cells out of disorganized systems. The guy has studied fireflies and gives numerous examples of such stuff. The problem is like there are numerous oscillators(say pendulum or RC-Circuits) and they can start with any charge(phase) with certain affect on each other soon they synchronize like crickets chirping together. There is no central control over the process. Somehow democratically they manage it amongst themselves. But doesnt exist in all the systems.
I could not understand the whole stuff but it said that in general there is a threshold value till which there is anarchy then the order appears. the graph that shows this behaviour reminded me of something.
In another book "Six Degrees: Science of Connected Age" the author dealt with random graphs and how social networks develop. He also showed the within a random graph the connectedness tended to be disordered but after a threshold the behaviour rised to a saturation level exponentially moving upwards but bend downwards.....
Strange and wierd non-linear is the new World gonna be....
