Pentium 4 found on Mars

THE THEMEof this forum is the digital universe, and La Intella's not kidding, apparently.

'We have to look beyond the Earth Internet towards the Interplanetary Internet,' claimed David Tannenhouse, VP and director of research at Intel labs, in his opening keynote address to the assembled multitudes. He claimed the corporation was privy to a plan to put a 4-node network on Mars. 'These guys are serious,' he barked.

Tannenhouse was extolling the virtues of ad-hoc networks and demonstrated the proposition by spontaneously building what he believed to be the world's largest ad-hoc network yet constructed - by connecting the 800 assembled Forumites together with little flashing devices.

They didn't actually do anything but they could, was the point, it seems. Tannenhouse is involved in looking forward to the time when the humans are outnumbered on the globe by computers by hundreds to one.

'We're approaching one computer per person,' he said, and yet we already face information overload. 'We need to get the humans on top by making the computers proactive. Proactive computers anticipate your needs and act on them if necessary', he declared.

And, to anticipate our needs, computers need to be wired into the environment, hence the ad-hoc networks that configure themselves, can consist of hundreds or thousands of nodes and which can be equipped with sensors to monitor what's going on out there on our planet and beyond.

'It's a dangerous proposition, Tannenhouse warned, 'But computer science may be on the verge of going through a similar transition as physics did in the twenties.'

The ability of computers to speculatively predict the immediate future in the way that some Internet search engines will pre-fetch links the searcher may potentially go to is key to Tannenhouse's vision of a world ram-full of processors. "We need to take that idea to a whole different level," he said. µ