• Question: Can computers keep getting faster

    Asked by kirbykirbo00 to Andrew, Jade, Jessica, Kevin, Lynn on 19 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by The Ge Ni U S.
    • Photo: Jess Wade

      Jess Wade answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      there’s no limit on the speed of computers, but there probably should be. We’re all quite worried that soon comptuers will become more intelligent than us and take over the world! cmputer speeds depend on the amount of heat that the computer can handle (because it heats up when we work it too hard) and also how lazy the little chips inside it get- sometimes their electronics cause delays in sending signals)

    • Photo: Kevin Honeychurch

      Kevin Honeychurch answered on 19 Jun 2015:

      The University of the West of England (UWE) has a research project leading to the making and programming of a new kind of computer, with liquid chemicals instead of silicon providing the processing power – the so-called ‘wet brain’ computer.

      The team’s new approach is to build ‘liquid’ computers that are more like biological brains. They are is working on algorithms that enable robots to learn new behaviours. They are also looking at a way to is working to programme the ‘wet brain’ using the same approach.

      Current computers are certainly powerful but they make millions of processing operations one after the other. Brains in humans and animals work very differently, with millions of operations going on all at the same time – they are said to be massively parallel.

      In the future computers, for instance to control intelligent robots that can learn, will need to have this massive parallelism too.

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