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From: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Processing
Message-ID: <2119@mmintl.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 28-Apr-87 17:54:42 EDT
Article-I.D.: mmintl.2119
Posted: Tue Apr 28 17:54:42 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 2-May-87 08:13:34 EDT
References: <505@sw1e.UUCP> <110@hippo.UUCP> <6123@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Reply-To: franka@mmintl.UUCP (Frank Adams)
Organization: Multimate International, E. Hartford, CT
Lines: 35

In article <6654@bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>No Frank, you misunderstand me. You say "sure we'll need gigaflops, we'll
>need it to do natural language and voice recognition..."
>
>That's my whole point. We don't know how to do all that and I don't
>believe (completely, trying not to be too dogmatic here) that it's the
>lack of cycles that's holding us back.
>...
>To put it another way, you have no proof (not getting stuffy here)
>that what's required to do natural language is more cycles. It seems
>plausible, but why aren't there any good software systems running on
>Crays (eg, or pick your favorite appropriate high-end box.) I'm just
>saying it's not obvious the lacking thing is cycles.

We can leave the Crays alone; those machines' time is too valuable to waste
on making their user interface more friendly, especially since the kind of
applications they are used for are not interface intensive anyhow.

There are natural language database systems on mainframes.  My impression is
that they suffer about equally from lack of computing power and lack of
software capability.  They aren't half bad, though.  (By the way, this
opinion is based on seeing canned demos, but no real hands on experience, so
take it for what it's worth.)

It is also worth noting that in many cases, *either* more sophisticated
software or more powerful machines will get you what you want.  For example,
I think it is clear that there are adequate pattern recognition programs
(voice or graphics) which don't run fast enough on hardware with a price low
enough to be feasible.  We might be able to do better with better software;
but we can certainly use what we have now if the hardware is two orders of
magnitude faster for the same price.

Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
Ashton-Tate          52 Oakland Ave North         E. Hartford, CT 06108