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James Calhoun Mrs. Seeman GE-117 Unit 10 Final Paper August 22, 2011 Microprocessors, Artificial Intellect, and Solar System Exploration Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its ongoing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before (Picard, Star Trek; The Next Generation Season 1 Episode 6). In the late 1960s Gene Rodenberry produced his stories about trekking through the stars where the crew aboard the Starship Enterprise as their mission would explore space and go where no one had gone before. How will it be possible for space exploration farther than the immediate orbit of earth 300,000 or so kilometers between earth and the moon by intellectual life-forms? The answer in short is Artificial Intellect. How will humans design an intelligence that could navigate the outer reaches of the solar system? The stepping-stone to intelligence exploring the solar system has already been invented; it is the microprocessor or Central Processing Unit (CPU). From the first CPU to now, CPUs have influenced the way that humans in developed societies live and function in life. Technological advances in the design, materials, and manufacture of CPUs have made the processor smaller and faster. The microprocessor of the future will be smaller, faster, and will set the stage for Artificial Intellect (AI) that will navigate beyond the known solar system.

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Since the first release of the certified CPU, processors have gotten faster. In 1968 a well-known engineer with the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM who was skeptical about a single chip possessing the ability to carry out multiple tasks asked the question What the hell is it good for? (Lloyd, Para 3). All machines that had circuits before the first CPUs; had circuits, diodes, and transistors in chip form in them, but none of them had a single programmable processor that could handle multiple instructions. So as an example of a machine in simple form, a calculator before 1968 would have an open close circuit, so that when the operator would push down the key, it would cause the circuit to open or close and as another key was pushed all of the open and closed circuits would compute the difference and provide an answer. Todays calculators can even receive a voiced instruction which can cause many processes to take place to perform complex calculations. To see a result of the speed of the CPU, the instructions per second must be increased. The speed of the CPU which is measured by Instructions per Second (IPS) has increased from 46,300 IPS by the first 4004 CPU designed by Intel and released to the public November 1971 to todays fastest CPU by Fujitsu the SPARC64 VIIIfx, handles 128,000,000,000 IPS (Fujitsu, Para 6), the contrast is like one plane flying almost five round trips to the moon in the same amount of time that another plane takes to fly one mile. How does faster CPU instructions relate to AI and the exploration of the solar system? Understanding that the ability to processes many instructions to preform complicated task is just a start. The AI will need to be fast enough to carry-out all regular instructions at a time when it is immediately needed. Since the vehicle used to explore space will not be linked 100 percent of the time to earth, the AI, along with its

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regular task may not receive the response from the earth to make a timely decision, when encountering an urgent decision situation. The CPU will be required to handle the programmed instructions along with the un-programmed instructions as quickly as the human brain. Though the fastest computer today does handle information about one tenth the processing speed of the human brain, the morality or conscience of the AI is not available yet. The size of the fastest supercomputer which also has 250,000 CPUs, takes up about an 80,000 square foot complex and processes one quadrillion IPS compared to the human brain which estimated processes over 10 quadrillion IPS (Discovery, paraphrase, Para 4). Comparatively for the computer to match the IPS of one human would cover an area of about 800,000 square feet where the human brain would cover an area of about 2.5 square feet. Many transistors in a smaller area are the only answer to the size of the CPU problem. Since the release of the 4004 CPU, processors have gotten smaller. The CoFounder of Intel Gordon Moore stated The number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months (Para 1). The size of the CPU is measured in number of transistors on to the die, the space in the CPU where all if the transistors are connected together. The amount of transistors has been increased exponentially from 2,300 on the 4004 processor 10,000 nanometer die in 1971 to todays Intel 10Core Xeon CPU boasting 2,600,000,000 transistors to the 32 nanometer die. By comparison the human hair is 100,000 nanometers wide. Compare the size of the first transistor die to the current transistor die size as compared to almost three North America continents and squeezing them down to the fit in the state of Delaware and

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squeeze the size down again to fit into the boundary of Sauvie Island; a small island located northwest of Portland downtown. The human brain has an estimated 120 billion neurons or cells that process information either by means of electrical impulse or chemical stimulation and each neuron makes about 10,000 connections to other neurons, this means that there are over 1,000 trillion (sextillion) connections and add to that the 50 chemical transmitters. The estimated number of neurons closely equals the number of stars that astronomers believe are in the Milky Way Galaxy. These connections fit inside of the 2.5 square feet of the human brain. Science does not agree on a definite timeline of fitting the same processes that run the supercomputers of today nor the supercomputers of tomorrow which will be able to process as fast as the human brain, but most science sets a range of time from 2021 to sometime close to 2050 where computers will possess similar numbers of transistors and connections as a human brain has neurons and its connections which might fit closely into the space that the human brain does. Will this technology give humans that ability to send these CPUs in the form of AI into space on an exploration mission? The microprocessor is the first step to exploration of the known solar system. Microprocessors, setting the stage for Artificial Intellect that will navigate beyond the known solar system. DARPA's new memristor-based approach to AI consists of a chip that mimics how neurons process information (Versace & Chandler, 1). Great achievements in nanotechnology and computer science are moving CPUs closer to a point where there will be enough transistors and speed that the computer will learn to process information nearly as fast as the human brain and at the point where computers

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begin to learn by their own programming AI will follow close behind. Since the human body has highly adverse effects to prolong periods in space, AI will be the most effective way of navigating to the extended reaches of the known solar system. To date, the National Aeronautics and Space Administrations deep-space probe Voyager which was launched in 1977, has in April reached the edge of the solar system 33 years since it was launched. The longest duration that a human has been in space was 748 days and the physical, emotional, and physiological effects of that duration were extreme on the body of the astronaut. The makeup of the human body will not handle with quality health the stress that long duration space flight will place on it. AI is a must if humans are to explore the vast expanses of the solar system. At the edge of the solar system and beyond, AI will chronicle the discoveries to be achieved. At that apex where technology and the ability to mimic human intellect meet will be the point where AI will advance the trek out into the far extents of the solar system. The discoveries will be astounding. At the center of the AI brain will be the CPU, a microprocessor, which before the first man walked on the moon in 1968 were just visions of engineers and designers at Intel and IBM.

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Works Cited
A Discovery Company. "How Stuff Works - What is the world's fastest computer?" 01 April 2010. Computer - How Stuff Works. Eiectronic Document. 07 August 2011. Fujitsu Corporation. "SPARC64 VIIIfx": A Fast, Reliable, Low-power CPU." 15 05 2009. Fujitsu Corporation Web Site. Electronic Document. 07 08 2011. HowStuffWorks.com. What is the Worlds Fastest Computer? 01 April 2000. Electronic Document. 10 August 2011. Institute of Neuromorphic Engineering. "Adaptive, brain-like systems give robots complex behaviors." 01 January 2011. The Neuromorphic Engineer. Electronic Document PDF. 22 July 2011. Intel. "Intel Web Press Release - Reprint; Electronics, Volume 38, Number 8, 4-19-1965 - The Experts Look Ahead: Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits." 1 January 2005. Intel Web Press Release. Electronic Document. 15 July 2011. Massimiliano Versace, Ben Chandler. "MoNETA: A Mind Made from Memristors." 15 December 2010. IEEE Spectrum via ProQuest Computing ProQuest Science Journals - ITT Virtual Library. Electronic Document. 15 July 2011. Moravec, Hans. "Rise of the Robots--The Future of Artificial Intelligence." 23 March 2009. http://people.cs.kuleuven.be/~danny.deschreye/RiseofRobots.pdf. Electronic Document PDF. 22 July 2011. To Boldly Go. Dir. Rob Bowman. Perf. Patrick Stewart. 1987. Television. Tomayko, James E. ""Anecdotes,"." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (1989): pp. 322-326. Book. <http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/MAHC.1989.10043>. World.com, Disabled. Human Brain - Facts and Answers. 19 October 2008. Electronic. 20 July 2011.