Where Does All the Computer Power Go?

The December 8, 2007 edition of The Economist includes its Technology Quarterly. A couple of the articles illustrate the theme of this series on where computer power goes (in the rich, wired countries).

Getting serious

Many of the serious uses of virtual worlds were on show at a conference held in September at Coventry University in England. Aptly, people could also take part in the conference by visiting an online re-creation of the university's Serious Games Institute, where they could chat with other participants and watch presentations. David Wortley, the institute's director, says half those attending did so this way. The focus of the conference was the application of computer-game technologies and virtual environments to real-world business problems.

Don't invent, evolve

As its name suggests, evolutionary design borrows its ideas from biology. It takes a basic blueprint and mutates it. As in biology, most mutations are worse than the original. But a few are better, and these are used to create the next generation. Evolutionary design uses a computer program called an evolutionary algorithm, which takes the initial parameters of the design (things such as lengths, areas, volumes, currents and voltages) and treats each like one gene in an organism. Collectively, these genes comprise the product's genome. By randomly mutating these genes and then breeding them with other, similarly mutated genomes, new offspring designs are created. These are subjected to simulated use by a second program. If one particular offspring is shown not to be up to the task, it is discarded. If it is promising, it is selectively bred with other fit offspring to see if the results, when subject to further mutation, can do even better.

The idea of evolutionary algorithms is not new. Until recently, however, their use has been confined to projects such as refining the aerodynamic profiles of car bodies, aircraft fuselages and wings. That is because only large firms have been able to afford the supercomputers needed to mutate and crossbreed large virtual genomes—and then simulate the behaviour of their offspring—for perhaps 20m generations before the perfect design emerges. What has changed, in this field as in so many others, is the availability and cheapness of computing power. According to John Koza of Stanford University, who is one of the pioneers of the field, evolutionary designs that would have taken many months to run on PCs are now feasible in days.

Reality, only better

For some things, it turns out, computer graphics can be much more effective when viewed not on screens, but superimposed on the real world. The technique is known as “augmented reality” (AR) or, less frequently, as “augmented vision”, because the real world is augmented with virtual text or graphics. Much AR technology remains in labs, but research funding in both the private and public sectors is increasing, and all kinds of eclectic and ingenious applications are emerging in fields as diverse as medicine, warfare, manufacturing and entertainment. (The article goes on to describe several applications of AR.)

Watching as you shop

One of the largest customer-monitoring projects undertaken so far is PRISM (or “Pioneering Research for an In-Store Metric”), a collaboration between Nielsen Media, a market-research firm, the In-store Marketing Institute, based in Chicago, and a consortium of consumer-goods manufacturers and retailers including Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble and Wal-Mart. The project, which completed its first big trial in September, involved the use of sensors at the entrance and exits and in some of the aisles of 160 stores across America. These sensors recorded data on customer-traffic patterns, to which was added further information recorded by human observers. By comparing the resulting data with sales information, it was then possible to gain insight into shoppers' behaviour......

Best Buy, a big American consumer-electronics chain, takes this a step further. It uses Brickstream's BehaviorIQ cameras to collect data on its customers' behaviour patterns and has used this information to divide them into five customer types—young technology enthusiasts, suburban mothers, affluent early adopters, family men and small-business owners—who want different things. Each group is then provided with an area of the shop designed to meet their needs.