Innovator Joseph Bates

摘要

What's the square root of 10? If you had to do it in your head, you might say "a little more than three." Computers, unlike humans, don't do back-of-the-envelope calculations. They just crunch the numbers to the last requested decimal place. Joseph Bates, however, thinks we'd be better off if we were to let computers make some mistakes. Bates, 55, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon and the MIT Media Lab, has designed a chip that does what computer engineers call "sloppy arithmetic," or guesstimating. Slightly inaccurate chips would be "much, much littler and much, much more efficient" than current chips, he says.