Sometimes you need to relax and zen out, for me that includes re-watching Star Trek. During one of these viewings, I was reminded of something I wanted to comment on. How smart is Commander Data? In an episode titled "The Offspring"we are told that Soong type androids (read Cmdr Data and his "relatives") can perform over 60 trillion operations per second. In the early 90's this number sounded insane, to perform a "mere" 1.9 billion operations per second you would need a Cray2 supercomputer, consuming more energy than 100 American homes (200 kW). So now that we have a context for how powerful people thought a supercomputer needed to be to simulate a human being, let's look at today's state of the art computers, the fastest supercomputer is in China, the Sunway TaihuLight, it can perform 93 petaflops (thats 93 quadrillion operations per second), that make Data look downright dumb. The PS4 and XBox One can both perform over one trillion operations per second (or 1/60th of Data's processing power). If early 21st century engineers can produce this much processing power, what the hell is Star Fleet doing with all of their intellectual wealth?
Honestly, comparing numbers just comes off as silly, I get that, the writers were creating material for a particular time period, and within the context of the late 80's/early 90's the number they provided gave a sense of power and also gave nerds a number to geek out over. This is a challenge for writers and futurists, coming up with ideas that are fantastical enough to inspire, but grounded enough to feel real. Alternatively, the definition that citizens of the federation use for operation could be far more complicated than what we use. For citizens of the federation, an operation could include thousands of sub-operations, one example, when processing an image there are many steps required to determine if there is a face on the screen a Star Trek level of operation might be the full action of find all potential shapes. Honestly I am making things up.
Fun things that Data couldn't do, but our computers can.
Use contractions
beat people at chess
Edit 7/11
win at poker, according to this article, mathematicians have created computer programs that are incredibly difficult to beat by humans. If Cmdr Data wanted to it would be possible for him to install said program into his own abilities.
there might be others but I can't remember
Honestly, comparing numbers just comes off as silly, I get that, the writers were creating material for a particular time period, and within the context of the late 80's/early 90's the number they provided gave a sense of power and also gave nerds a number to geek out over. This is a challenge for writers and futurists, coming up with ideas that are fantastical enough to inspire, but grounded enough to feel real. Alternatively, the definition that citizens of the federation use for operation could be far more complicated than what we use. For citizens of the federation, an operation could include thousands of sub-operations, one example, when processing an image there are many steps required to determine if there is a face on the screen a Star Trek level of operation might be the full action of find all potential shapes. Honestly I am making things up.
Fun things that Data couldn't do, but our computers can.
Use contractions
beat people at chess
Edit 7/11
win at poker, according to this article, mathematicians have created computer programs that are incredibly difficult to beat by humans. If Cmdr Data wanted to it would be possible for him to install said program into his own abilities.
there might be others but I can't remember
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