The Future Lies Ahead: “Soft Computing” Copyright © 2003 Patrick McDermott UC Berkeley Extension

Human Smartest? “Before [the 21 st ] century is over “human beings will no longer be the most intelligent or capable type of entity on the planet.”. Kurzweil, Ray, The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence, New York: Viking ( ), “There are more than enough new computing technologies now being researched, including three- dimensional chips, optical computing, crystalline computing, DNA computing, and quantum computing, to keep the law of accelerating returns [Moore’s Law] going for a long time.” “Once a computer achieves a human level of intelligence, it will necessarily soar past it.”

Soft Computing Evolutionary algorithms and genetic programming Neural science and neural network systems Fuzzy set theory and fuzzy systems Chaos theory and chaotic systems Particle swarms and swarm intelligence Kennedy, James & Russell C. Eberhart, Swarm Intelligence, San Francisco: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers ( ), 2001.

Double E Emergence & Evolution The Emergence Paradox – Lots of Dumb  Smart Swarm Intelligence Nanotechnology Evolutionary Programming Data Mining Berry, Michael J.A. & Gordon Linoff, Data Mining Techniques: For Marketing, Sales, and Customer Support, New York: Wiley Computer Publishing ( ), 1997.

Soft Computing is Hard I 1. Hard computing requires programs to be written; soft computing can evolve its own programs. 2. Hard computing uses two-valued logic; soft computing can use multivalued or fuzzy logic. 3. Hard computing is deterministic; soft computing incorporates stochasticity. 4. Hard computing requires exact input data; soft computing can deal with ambiguous and noisy data. …

Soft Computing is Hard II 5. Hard computing is strictly sequential; soft computing allows parallel computations. 6. Hard computing produces precise answers; soft computing can yield approximate answers. 7. Hard computing takes more time to develop; soft computing can yield results more quickly. 8. Hard computing requires pre- programmed instructions; soft computing can learn.

What Technologies You are now tasked by your company to recommend what areas you should look into for future developments What emerging technologies (if any) should your business look into over the next one to three years. Why? Plan –What to do in short term, over next year –What in long term, from there on out