Carmine's Kernel

Back on Earth: Going Deep on Channel 9

It's been a while since my last post, but in my opinion that's fine because I haven't had much to say. That said, I still don't that have too much to say, but I am going to say it anyway.

This year, I will be doing many more interviews for Channel 9 (and a lot less coding, which is good, but also a little strange, but I need to grow...). Going Deep will continue strong this year and I will be focusing primarily on Vista (but not exclusively by any means).

Yesterday, we sat down and talked with 4 Windows kernel architects about the state of Windows architecture today, what the Windows Architecture team is (and why), the challenges of functional dependencies and the overall impact they have on shipping frequency, the future of NT, Security and other fun OS topics. Windows is a wonderfully complex OS that is on track to get better and better, from a core architecture standpoint, with each iteration. The obvious benefit of a cohesive architecture with well-understood functional dependency boundaries, smart thread management (to name a few) is that Windows users will have a more reliable, stable, performant and safe operating system. Great discussion. You'll see it on Channel 9 in the near future as part of the Going Deep series.

I also recently interviewed the Singularity research team (again) and had a great (and deep) discussion with some super smart folks in MSR (Microsoft Research). The interviewees were The Usual Suspects, Galen Hall and Jim Larus, plus two new faces, Manuel Fahndrich and David Tarditi. They are doing some really great work over in MSRLand and it was fun to talk to four of the scientists working on the Singularity project. Singularity, it seems, is evolving nicely... Also, in this episode, you will learn how Singularity is designed and why design decisions were made (like whey they decided to stick with Threads when, theoretically, they didn't need to). I really enjoy talking to people who are orders of magnitude more educated than myself in the computer science domain, not mention much smarter! Wow. That was a great interview. Stay tuned to Channel 9...

There's plenty more upcoming from C9's Going Deep so please stay tuned. Also, I would love to hear from you about what technologies you'd like to learn more about, from a programmatic and architectural point of view. Also, let me know what types of content you'd like to see on Channel 9. How about having a dev talk about a chunk of code she's writing, explaining design decisions, gotchas, tricks, etc? Hmm. Wonder what our legal department would say about that one.

I plan on blogging more this year. But, I won't blog just to blog. Read my first blog post to see why.

(Hey, TypePad team, what's up with the formatting on my archived posts?)

Cheers,

C

Well, do you?
C

Singularity on Channel 9

Check out the interview I did on Channel 9 with two of the MS researchers working on a prototype operating system, Singularity, written primarily in safe C#. Of course, Singularity's HAL is written in unmanaged code, but most everything else is managed. Very cool indeed.

I look forward to seeing where this project leads in terms of the evolution of consumer operating systems. As was addressed in the interview, research operating systems like Singularity will enable wide-open experimentation and implementation of crazy ideas like a threadless OS, an intelligent OS (cybernetic, homeostatic system with the ability to learn and adapt), you name it.

I look forward to the day when my OS will not only be secure, reliable and performant but also adaptable, preemptive, modular and capable of thinking. Of course, the later requirement is probably 50 to 75 years out, but the notion of a Windows NT where T stands for Thinking is quite compelling!

Enjoy the interview. Please share your thoughts either on Channel 9 or here.

Back to Titan

Anybody else find it to be kind of strange that no new information has been released regarding data analysis of Titan's air and surface? Yes, Nature's newest issue contains pictures and data and conclusions that we already have seen (I love the Internet!).

It is interesting to note that some surface process is adding and removing methane from Titan's atmoshpere. I'm not ready to concede that this process is non-biological. There is no proof either way. The article in Nature just prooves this notion.

We need to go back to Titan with rovers and we need to do it soon. Do you think we can get Paul Allen to help fund this endeavour? NASA will just drag its heavy feet...

Spot the Bug on Channel 9

If you're a developer, check out this Spot the Bug post on Channel 9. These will appear every week or so (maybe longer intervals, depends on juiciness of the code sample). Enjoy and spot those bugs (there's a few of them...)!

Levels of Organization in General Intelligence

In order for Artificial Intelligence (AI) to be realized, a comprehensive understanding of general intelligence (human intelligence) must be achieved, but not necessarily replicated. What is intelligence, anyway? Eliezer S. Yudkowsky states: In humans, intelligence is a brain with a hundred billion neurons and a hundred trillion synapses; a brain in which the cerebral cortex alone is organized into 52 cytoarchitecturally distinct areas per hemisphere.  Intelligence is not the complex expression of a simple principle; intelligence is the complex expression of a complex set of principles.  Intelligence is a supersystem composed of many mutually interdependent subsystems - subsystems specialized not only for particular environmental skills but for particular internal functions.

He postulates that there are no simple set of rules we can use to define the complex process of thinking abstractly and further argues that unlike physics, the field of AI cannot succeed by condensing complexity into relatively simple expressions.

Read Yudkowsky's Levels of Organization in General Intelligence to learn more about the application of general intelligence in AI. Overall, it's an interesting read.

Thoughts?

Wise words from Lenn

Lenn Pryor, the creator of Channel 9, my boss and my friend shared some wise words today in a post entitled The value of a good umbrella and an even better safety net. All I can say is that it's been an honor working on "crazy" projects dreamed up by Lenn and I look forward to many more opportunities to prove naysayers wrong. I also extend my gratitude to the senior leaders at Microsoft who encouraged us to take a chance and protected us from harm's way. Einstein said that if at first it isn't absurd, then it probably isn't a great idea. Congratulations on the success of Channel 9, Lenn.

Autochthonous Life

The following ideas have lived in my head for a long time and were initially invoked as a result of understanding the compelling hypothesis put forth by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, the so-called Gaia Hypothesis which states that the cumulative effect of the metabolic, physical and chemical properties of living systems on Earth is a cybernetic system with homeostatic tendencies, tightly coupled to the planet's physical surface properties such as atmosphere and geology.

It occurred to me that not only was the core idea of this Gaian system plausible on Earth, but it was probably a signature of a class of life that exists in potentially large numbers of other worlds in the universe. It is unfortunate that a substantial segment of the scientific community still prefers to think of life as a consequential phenomenon with the advent of biological systems being extraterrestrial in origin and the impact life has on sustained planetary habitability and evolution as insignificant. The accepted idea seems to be that life on Earth exists as a result of some cosmic "seeds" planted on Earth during the age of bombardment (early on in Earth's history it was heavily pummeled by asteroids, some presumably carriers of life's essential chemical ingredients) coupled with randomly perfect conditions for "germination".

I, and others, disagree with this notion. Life, as amazing and wonderful as it truly is, is a planetry surface property that is bound both in advent and evolution to the planet upon which it happens. By looking at life in this way (from a systems as well as planetary perspective), the possibility of finding living systems (of the same class as Earth's) throughout the galaxy is very good. In the next 5-10 years we will have the instrumentation to start searching our galaxy for "life like ours" utilizing techniques of atmospheric spectral analysis combined with new telescopes.

In earlier posts I've briefly touched on Lovelock's approach to the detection of life on other planets. Does this life really need to be like ours? If so, to what extent? I argue that there are classes of life that exhibit similar behavior, but need not be composed of similar ingredients or design (like cellular genetic systems). So, then how do you define "life like ours"? Good question.

Life like ours can be defined as an autochthonous geobiological autopoietic cybernetic system. What?

In a nutshell: life like ours is a dynamic system, an adaptive planetary surface property, originating on the planet where it is found (tied to planetary formation and evolution), provides regulatory feedback mechanisms that ensure planetary habitability, and is remotely detectable via atmospheric spectral analysis due to dynamic atmospheric chemical exchange (life like ours perturbs atmospheres as a consequence of the processes associated with the daily business of living). Our class of life is a planetary-scale system composed of sub systems (animals, plants, microbes, cells, viruses, dna) that cumulatively, some more than others, act to ensure that Earth remains habitable for life. For this class of life, the particular composition and associated behaviors of sub systems are implementation details. Again, life like ours is a planetary surface property, just like the atmosphere, land and oceans. Astronomers like to say, and correctly so, that we are made of stars. Narrowing the scope a bit, it can also be said that we are made of Earth.

Can the Earth be used as a general model for rocky planets possessing autochthonous geobiologic surface properties?

Can a planet's surface be favorable for life without supporting autochthonous life forms?

Look into the light.

What will the 64-bit world look like?

With the advent of 64 bit processors and the operating systems that virtualize them, we are going to see some amazing new technologies emerge in the next 5-10 years. I had the pleasure of interviewing some folks involved in the 64 bit revolution today and really left the interview feeling excited about the future of applications and what we will be able to do on our personal computers thanks to powerful 64 bit processors coupled with cheap memory. You'll be able to see the interview on Channel 9 in a few weeks.

With 64 bit computing, there is no longer the 32-bit memory barrier that hampers things like fast analysis of very large datasets (because on 32-bit systems you can't hold them in-memory without causing significant perf problems or a dreaded out of memory exception...). Also, there is increased performance of the system generally due to the greater working address space. When apps start being written in 64-bit mode from scratch (that is, not ported from 32-bit), the possibilities of what we will see are truly compelling, like new types of games and powerful video/audio processing applications for your 64-bit laptop.

What new applications might we expect as a result of 64-bit computing?

Fractal branching ultra-dexterous robots

If you're into AI and robots, then you no doubt know who Hans Moravec is. He pretty much has set out to make better-than-human machines. I'm not really a robot guy, so I honestly didn't know too much about Hans and his work. Thanks to Jim Gray for tuning me into this. Really brilliant stuff. ( Maybe Hans will help me design TOS: Thinking Operating System :) )

Here's a quote from one of his papers on bush robots that nicely generalizes the notion of fractal hands:

"Once upon a time, the most complex animal was a worm. The stick-like shape was poorly adapted for manipulation and even locomotion. Then these stick-like animals grew smaller sticks, called legs, and locomotion was much improved, although they were still poor at manipulating. Then the smaller sticks grew yet smaller sticks, and hands, with manipulating fingers were invented and precise manipulation of the environment became possible.

Generalize the concept. Visualize a robot that looks like a tree, with a big stem, repeatedly branching into thinner, shorter and more numerous twigs, finally ending up in vast numbers of microscopic cilia. Each intermediate branch would have several degrees of freedom of sensed and controlled motion. Though each branch would be a rigid mechanical object, the overall structure would have an organic flexibility because of the huge numbers of degrees of freedom. At the outer extremes, the machine would have an enormous number of individually positionable and naturally swift manipulators, coordinated for simultaneous execution of otherwise unimaginable tasks by signals and power from the central regions."

Yes, I see.

Check out more of these papers on Bush robots. Enjoy.