THE WASHINGTON POST [15/02/13]
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Haven’t we all felt the urge to throw our laptop against the wall when the screen goes blank at 3 am, and totally wipes hours of hard work?
To prevent those frustrating computer crashes, scientists at University College London (UCL) have created a self-healing computer. The “systemic” machine, according to a report in the New Scientist, can instantly recover corrupted data.
The team behind the “systemic computer” built it to be able to respond to random and unpredictable events. Computers were originally built to follow a linear set of instructions, and can only consider one thing at a time.
“Even when it feels like your computer is running all your software at the same time, it is just pretending to do that, flicking its attention very quickly between each program,” Peter Bentley, a computer scientist at UCL, said in an interview with the New Scientist.
Together with his colleague Christos Sakellariou, Bentley re-engineered a new computer that thinks more like the human brain.
It’s all about safety in numbers: the new computer contains multiple copies of its instructions across its individual systems, so if one fails, it can access clean copy and repair itself. In the future, the scientists are working to incorporate machine learning, so if you’re sitting outside working and the temperature gets too high, the computer will respond to preemptively prevent a crash.
The next generation of school kids may need to come up with a more creative excuse for failing to turn in work on time!
Copyright 2013, VentureBeat
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