SDM Utsav Souvenir - SDMCET

50 years ago, a nation would be considered a developed nation,
based on its industrial muscle – that is, the size and efficacy of its
manufacturing industry; which in turn decides the stability of its
economy. But, today people use a different yardstick for
measuring the level of 'development' of a society. Today, the new
yardstick to measure the growth (strength) of a society is – the ability
to handle information. The control over data flow has become
synonymous with control over money. With the growth of
Information Technology, the very mode of our living and working
has changed; every industry has either changed, or is changing its
mode of life and work. More and more machines are employed to
do the hard labour. And these machines are controlled through
computers. The earlier paradigm of humans controlling machines, has
given way to humans operating computers – which in turn control the
machines. And the computers control machines by processing data,
which it does extremely well in terms of both speed and accuracy, the
control is quick and more precise. Obviously this leads to
improvement in the quality and quantity of the results.
Today computers have become critical equipment not only for
universities and research laboratories, but also schools and colleges,
transport and aviation, banks and commercial establishments,
newspapers and government offices – in short, all walks of our life.
According to a report, in advanced countries like the US) , more than
40% of the workforce is engaged in dealing with computers, and
information technology related jobs. As a consequence, the study
of computers – nay, the study of computer languages – has become an
essential part of education – as important as literacy itself.
Powerful Tool
Information, knowledge and wisdom are said to be three different
things. 'Information' is collection of data on facts; as we try to
make sense out of the data, we begin to discern certain patterns
behind the spread of data; vision of the pattern is called
'knowledge'. Accumulated knowledge, when tempered by
experience and deep reflection, sometimes leads to rare and
powerful insights of general rules of Nature, which we call
'wisdom'. Computers can store enormous amount of data, and it can
process data at a tremendous speed.
An IC chip today can store a circuit containing a billion MOSFETs, using
a clock speed of 3 billion cycles per second. A common CD ROM or
DVD today –measuring less than 10 cm in diameter – can store on
its surface Gigabytes of data – that is, it can house all the volumes of
Encyclopedia Britannica! Both these factors – the capacity to store
large amount of data and extremely high processing speed – have
made the computer a most powerful tool of scientific and
technological development. However, being passive storehouse of
data and the ability to process it at high speed (under instruction) by
itself doesnot imply knowledge . And certainly, the computer cannot
convert the knowledge into wisdom. That is why the computer is often
compared to a slave who can gurgle enormous amount of data, at a
very high speed without boredom. The slave has very little originality,
creativity or wisdom – which are the attributes of gifted humans !
The tool by itself does not produce knowledge or wisdom; but
the power of the computer comes from these very facts – the huge data
storage capacity, the high speed of operation, and high degree of
accuracy in results. These features can be very powerful tools under
the guidance of (intelligent) humans, who know how to deal with the
machine .
The computer has caused a paradigm shift. This is especially so, in the
context of science and technology. Scientific development –
especially, the physical sciences – invariably depends upon the
mathematical formulation – modeling and analysis of physical
problems. It is the analysis that leads to understanding, quantification,
and eventually, design and solution. Mathematics belonged to the realm
of a few gifted individuals who could understand and translate scientific
problems into mathematical formulations, and provide closed form
solutions for these formulations. With the advent of computers, many
scientific analysis shifted to numerical techniques – simulating the
system behavior in the computer – which require enormously large
number of computations. Eventually, as the computational power was
on the rise almost all scientific investigations started using the
computer to do the data processing – and soon the most complex
scientific analysis – including linear and nonlinear systems, single
variable and multivariable, time invariant as well as time varying systems
– have been handled using the numerical techniques of computers. If
Mathematics is the Queen of sciences, Computer is the most faithful
servant upon whose energy, speed and refinement upon which she
depends to rule the scientific world !
Future prospects
Where are we heading to ?
The digital computer depends on the high speed logic circuits to do the
job. Anything that need to be handled by the computer, need to be first
converted into the frame that the machine can understand and
interpret. The output of the computer is in the form of coded numbers
which need to be translated into formulations intelligible to common
human sense.
To state the obvious again, the digital computer can be involved in
solving problems that can be reframed in terms of Binary logic. Decision
making process of a computer is 'logical', as per the dictates of the
'programme' that has been loaded into the memory. However, life is
not always logical ; not all issues that call for decisions belong to this
category. There are many problems – that call for 'human' decision
making – which need to bank on 'knowledge', 'experience', 'wisdom'
and sometimes the wholly illogical 'intuition'. Can the digital computer
- based on binary logic - can be evolved and reorganized into a higher
level – to solve problems in a manner similar to human judgment ?
This is one of the (important) questions which has been bothering the
computer scientists for quite some time.
Human decisions may differ from that of a programmed computer on
several counts. It may involve different levels of human conscience;
however, certain branches of study – known as artificial intelligence -
attempt at harnessing (copying) the decision making process of human
mind. The Artificial Neural Networks attempt to copy human brain –
modeling the decision making process of individual neuron as well as
the network of neurons – into the digital computer ! Human mind
often forgets details (isolated data ), but remembers patterns (holistic
data) ; recalls data from memory based on prompting (content
addressable memory) ; and learns from mistakes (supervised and
unsupervised learning) etc. Artificial Neural Network techniques
attempts at modeling the neurons in the brain (decision making
algorithm ) and the network arrangement of neurons in digital
computer , so as to make it a little more 'human' in its decision making
process.
The Fuzzy logic techniques, attempt at copying the approximate
reasoning technique (making decisions with incomplete
data/reasoning) of humans into the computer.
While such attempts –at building a computer modeled after the human
brain - were as old as the computer itself, the efforts in this direction did
not yield as great results as the development of digital computer itself
(in terms of speed, complexity and energy efficiency etc.). However, the
limited success achieved so far have encouraged people to sustained
efforts, and it is likely to impact life with another paradigm shift in the
years to come.
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