The image faded and was replaced by an aerial view of the gridlike streets of Midtown Manhattan. “A circuit as complex as Manhattan could fit on the tip of my finger,” he said. “And unlike a real city, there are no traffic jams, no gridlock. All of it works flawlessly. Not a single packet of electrons out of place.
“In a computer chip, time is also miniaturized. Your computer can do operations—multiply two numbers, or communicate with its neighbors—about once every nanosecond. A one-gigahertz processor makes roughly a billion computations a second. Think about it. A billion in one second. You only live for, at most, three billion seconds. In only three ticks of the clock, a computer has as many thoughts as you will have in your whole life.” Jake stopped to let that sink in. “So every three seconds, your computer is like the entire population of Manhattan living a lifetime. And people wonder why it takes so long to boot up.”
A few laughs rippled through the students.
“Miniaturization was the most revolutionary force in the second half of the twentieth century. From Bill Gates to Gordon Moore, empires have been made constructing and controlling tiny electron cities that have lifetimes of thoughts in seconds. Computers, in effect, miniaturized our thoughts. But humans do more than think. What else do we do?”
“Sleep,” someone called from the back. More laughs.
“True enough. What else?”
“Move. We walk around.”
“Right. We walk. But walking is a pretty sophisticated form of locomotion. Let’s start with something simpler. What about crawling, for example? Can we make machines that crawl?
“Let me introduce a couple of my graduate students,” Jake said. He waved, and they came up on stage. “This is Joe Xu and Dave Gruber. They’ve got something to show you.”
Jake kept going while Dave and Joe set up. “How many of you have heard of DARPA?”
A few hands went up.
“DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a kind of military venture-capital firm—always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. The Internet, the global positioning system, and the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, those were all DARPA projects. Most sink like a stone, but those that succeed can change the world.
“In 2004, DARPA hit upon a new way to drive innovation: the DARPA Grand Challenge competitions. These are open competitions where DARPA sets a goal and teams of scientists and engineers from around the country try and tackle it. The first one was to create a car that could navigate a desert racecourse without a driver. First prize was two million dollars. In 2004, nobody succeeded. In 2005, five crossed the finish line. By 2007, the challenge had moved from the desert to city streets, and people are now seriously talking about driverless cars on America’s highways. The lesson was clear: you throw money and talent at a problem, spice it up with a little head-to-head battle, and it’s incredible how fast innovation can happen.
“For their next competition, DARPA went small,” Jake continued. “The Grand MicroChallenge was to develop a robot smaller than a dime that could survive on its own in a woodland environment, without external guidance or power, for a month. The ‘woods’ consisted of a giant terrarium DARPA set up in a storage hangar at Fort Belvoir, near Mount Vernon in Virginia. The first year was a bust. Nobody got close, including our team. All the entrants ran out of juice long before the month was out. But the next year, with Liam Connor’s help, we won it running away.” This got their attention. Liam was a legend—the old man’s wrinkled face was easily the most recognized on campus.
Joe and Dave were nearly ready, and Jake retreated to the edge of the stage. Joe, whose real name was Xinjian, was a classic physics grad student, tall and thin, with wide eyes and a love for detail. He was in his fifth year, finishing his thesis on the mechanics of
“In a computer chip, time is also miniaturized. Your computer can do operations—multiply two numbers, or communicate with its neighbors—about once every nanosecond. A one-gigahertz processor makes roughly a billion computations a second. Think about it. A billion in one second. You only live for, at most, three billion seconds. In only three ticks of the clock, a computer has as many thoughts as you will have in your whole life.” Jake stopped to let that sink in. “So every three seconds, your computer is like the entire population of Manhattan living a lifetime. And people wonder why it takes so long to boot up.”
A few laughs rippled through the students.
“Miniaturization was the most revolutionary force in the second half of the twentieth century. From Bill Gates to Gordon Moore, empires have been made constructing and controlling tiny electron cities that have lifetimes of thoughts in seconds. Computers, in effect, miniaturized our thoughts. But humans do more than think. What else do we do?”
“Sleep,” someone called from the back. More laughs.
“True enough. What else?”
“Move. We walk around.”
“Right. We walk. But walking is a pretty sophisticated form of locomotion. Let’s start with something simpler. What about crawling, for example? Can we make machines that crawl?
“Let me introduce a couple of my graduate students,” Jake said. He waved, and they came up on stage. “This is Joe Xu and Dave Gruber. They’ve got something to show you.”
Jake kept going while Dave and Joe set up. “How many of you have heard of DARPA?”
A few hands went up.
“DARPA stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. It’s a kind of military venture-capital firm—always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. The Internet, the global positioning system, and the Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, those were all DARPA projects. Most sink like a stone, but those that succeed can change the world.
“In 2004, DARPA hit upon a new way to drive innovation: the DARPA Grand Challenge competitions. These are open competitions where DARPA sets a goal and teams of scientists and engineers from around the country try and tackle it. The first one was to create a car that could navigate a desert racecourse without a driver. First prize was two million dollars. In 2004, nobody succeeded. In 2005, five crossed the finish line. By 2007, the challenge had moved from the desert to city streets, and people are now seriously talking about driverless cars on America’s highways. The lesson was clear: you throw money and talent at a problem, spice it up with a little head-to-head battle, and it’s incredible how fast innovation can happen.
“For their next competition, DARPA went small,” Jake continued. “The Grand MicroChallenge was to develop a robot smaller than a dime that could survive on its own in a woodland environment, without external guidance or power, for a month. The ‘woods’ consisted of a giant terrarium DARPA set up in a storage hangar at Fort Belvoir, near Mount Vernon in Virginia. The first year was a bust. Nobody got close, including our team. All the entrants ran out of juice long before the month was out. But the next year, with Liam Connor’s help, we won it running away.” This got their attention. Liam was a legend—the old man’s wrinkled face was easily the most recognized on campus.
Joe and Dave were nearly ready, and Jake retreated to the edge of the stage. Joe, whose real name was Xinjian, was a classic physics grad student, tall and thin, with wide eyes and a love for detail. He was in his fifth year, finishing his thesis on the mechanics of
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