Pouring over your new computer
A computer that increases its speed by spilling water on it. Paint that comes with a predefined pattern such as a digital photo, much like wallpaper, which becomes apparent as you slap it on a surface.
"Self-assembling" materials that fold on themselves to become new objects.
These are some of the possibilities that Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Hal Abelson says could become fact as early as 2015.
Abelson, visiting La Trobe University last week to discuss expanded sharing of facilities with Australian universities, said computer scientists were turning more often to nature to inform their creation of next-generation computing systems.
"Think about computing as stuff that was built into things," Abelson said. "If I wanted to do some computation, I would take my glass of computational stuff and pour it out on the table. It would sit there and organise itself to do computing and, gee, if that wasn't enough I would just go and pour some more.
"We're starting to enter a time of technology where we can imagine that. We can imagine that microfabrication is so good and so powerful that tiny little computing elements are not much bigger than particles (in a glass of water).
"Computational fluid would be an insanely cheap computer. What's hard is to arrange the pieces in a classical computer precisely. If they didn't have to be arranged precisely you could build an enormous computer very cheaply.
"Over the next 10 years you could imagine termite colonies running Microsoft Windows; a very scary thought."
Even individual cells, such as bacteria, could be programmed at a desktop to perform miraculous tasks, he said.
Abelson said one of his students did research on sheets of materials that folded themselves into different patterns using origami's standard half-dozen folds, and though he says he is "terrible at predicting" when new technologies will become available, he expects significant progress within 10 years.
"One of the things that surprised me when we started this was the use of biological materials as substrates for programming," Abelson said.
"Smart Paint" is another technology in its early phases, but offers the possibility that individual paint particles could be programmed to form a larger image, much the same as the way a digital image is portrayed on a PC screen.
It may be possible.
A focus of Abelson's visit was to enthuse Australian universities to affiliate with the world-leading technology institute by sharing such things as lab facilities.
The "iCampus initiative" would make available expensive lab facilities, such as seismic quake tables that measure the effect of tectonic shifts, to a broader range of universities worldwide, he said.
"We'd like a model where we work with a few hub institutions. It's not confirmed yet but we're working with the University of Queensland, but we would like to see a hub in Victoria."
Affiliates working together would break down the islands of technology and process systems such as accounting and management IT that universities often employ.
They would also be encouraged to use the free open courseware from MIT that is available on the net.
Existing lab equipment already available for remote control via the net, such as radio telescopes, could also be deployed on such a system.
Universities could also bid for parts of larger laboratory or systems upgrades by each providing a portion of the final project and then linking them together using iCampus's framework and broadband networks, reducing costs and providing facilities that no university could provide alone.
"One of the things we're doing at MIT in iLab is working with a couple of universities in sub-Saharan Africa where students can get access to very, very expensive electronics equipment," he said.
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