Technology Stalwarts

Dennis Ritchie
September 9, 1941 - October 12, 2011

printf("Goodbye Ritchie\n");

The man behind the foundation of the digital era...

The man who co-developed Unix System...

The man behind C...

As a computer science student, it was really hard to accept his death. He was the very individual who revolutionized the digital age with the creation of the programming language C and Unix along with his colleague Ken Thompson at the Bell Laboratories.

The entire world of computer science revolves around programming with C which has influenced the development of several other programming languages like C++, C#, Java, Python, PHP, JavaScript.

Every tablet that is out in the market, every iphone is rooted to this contribution by the computer scientist Dennis Ritchie.

R.I.P Father of C and Unix, Dennis M Ritchie

If you don't have an iphone, well...you don't have an iphone...

The man behind Apple...

The man who revolutionized the mp3 player to the uber cool ipod...

The co founder of Pixar Animation Studios which gave us Toy Story, a brilliant animation series...

The man behind "i" in digital era...

R.I.P Steven Paul Jobs

It's disheartening to find out so many brilliant people out there are no longer with us today. It was astonishing to find out John McCarthy joins the list of people whom we owe a lot today....

John McCarthy
September 4, 1927 - October 24, 2011

The individual who coined the term Artificial Intelligence...

The founder of LISP (LISt Processing), one of the most influential programming languages...

The one who was involved in the development of time - sharing systems without which the INTERNET wouldn't have existed...

R.I.P John McCarthy

Three of the technology stalwarts are longer with us today. This definitely seems like a doomsday conspiracy by the Almighty.

Man v/s Machines

Compassion, fear, hope, anger, frustration, loneliness, sorrow, happiness,surprise, envy, misery, gratitude...
These are some amongst the multitude of emotions that an individual experiences in one's lifetime. We can "feel" these wide ranging emotions, but machines? Not yet...

All these can be clearly observed in human beings or the Homo sapiens...other species can do so too but to a certain extent. These emotions can be considered as the various psychological states of an individual's mind. They originate in the limbic system of the human brain which comprises the thalamus, hypothalamus, amygdala, hippocampus.

I wouldn't go into the anatomy part of it for I am not a neurosurgeon!!! But, these complex emotions change the very fact that machines which despite tremendous technological advances aren't able to experience these making our species a class apart from them(May be in the future, machines may out do man). It's fascinating to watch science fiction movies like Terminator, Star trek, I,Robot or read books like 3001: The Final Odyssey by Arthur C Clarke. Researchers have been working on such possibilities since ages and this has led to a field of Strong Artificial Intelligence which aims to develop machines which can mimic man in all aspects and probably exceed human capabilities. Advances in the field of AI has led to applications such as neural networks, data mining and computer pattern recognition.

 For instance, IBM's Watson defeated humans on the quiz show Jeopardy in the human versus machine match. It's astonishing to hear about these breakthroughs. What people fail to realise is that it was man who came up with the complex algorithms and software in such computer systems. I salute thee, O Creator. This ultimately brings us to the conclusion that unless scientists come up with software which can learn all by itself, it's the human brain which is responsible for all the scientific establishments.

NASA's robot

This makes me wonder about the tremendous hidden potential this 1.5 kilogram mass of cells can do if challenged! More to look out for in the future!!!