Google has done it again!
Particle Borzon, Staff Writer, Gloomberg News;
Anay Nireplag, Special Correspondent, Disassociated Press
Thursday, April 1, 2010
MOUNTAIN VIEW,CA -- Responding to long standing concerns that the company is lagging behind its competitors in the rapidly evolving social networking space, Google today announced a major new initiative which has once again put it ahead of the game in harnessing the "power of the crowds".
Leveraging its position as a leader in search and cloud computing, Google announced that it has begun building the ultimate planet-size data center: wiring the brains of all people on the globe into one large computational cluster, whose ultimate mission is to run a "question-answering" application.
"Researchers have discovered quite a while ago that for any one person who poses a question, you can find several others who have the answers readily available in their brains," says Google's Director of Research and renowned artificial intelligence (AI) expert Peter Norvig, "The only missing piece was the substrate which could link them together." But now, thanks to the amazing technology developed by Google's top engineers, for the first time in history, it can be done on a planet-wide scale! In fact, the results generated by this human-powered computing cluster are so relevant and concise that Google decided to completely replace its decade-old search engine with this latest technological breakthrough.
No more sifting through the millions of search results generated by a clever but "mindless" algorithm. No more frustration from trying to repeatedly phrase and rephrase questions in the form of search queries.Talking to GBrain (that is the nickname of the newly-born techno-wonder which was coined--not surprisingly--by asking this very question to GBrain itself) is like talking to a neighbor or family member: one simply asks questions in plain English (or any other spoken language), and the answer comes back in plain-speak!
Since GBrain is so new, it is still a bit slower than the old and obsolete "algorithm"-based Google search engine, but users do not seem to mind. "Getting an answer half a second later is not a big deal", says high-school student Max E. Mizer, "but you get such brilliant answers that you don't need to look anywhere else anymore." His favorite way of using GBrain (besides, obviously, getting help with homework) is to decide which of his female classmates are most likely to accept his invitation to Prom.
The technology behind GBrain is both subtle and surprisingly eco-friendly. It harnesses the unused brain cycles of people when they are not concentrating on thinking about answering a question (which turns out to be 99.7% of the time). It also leverages the rotation cycle of the Earth, which allows GBrain to shift the computational load to the parts of the globe where people are asleep.
All that is needed for a person to seamlessly link into the GBrain networking fabric is a proximity to any device connected to the power grid. Google has partnered with Cisco and major telecommunication companies to jointly create necessary bridging between the Internet backbone and so-called "edge devices". Deploying the GBrain grid involves wireless beaming of the software patches to a number of devices already present in every household: TVs, entertainment centers, game consoles, picture frames, and even such common appliances such as dishwashers, vacuum cleaners, and hair dryers.