New challenge

About a year ago I started something that, a few days ago, came to a conclusion - but to be fair, it's more a milestone than a conclusion.
In August of last year (2008), I applied for a job at Ghent University. In the months that followed I went through the selection process, and after some hurdles I got selected. In April of this year (2009), I started on my new job. And now, six months later, my trial period is over. After a very good evaluation, I was appointed to the job, starting October 1st.
It took me over a year to get so far, but now I've reached what I was aiming for since then. But of course, this is just the start of it all. I have the rest of my life's working career ahead of me at Ghent University. And I'm still getting started, with a lot of plans to accomplish, projects to start, task being assigned, ... I'll know what to do the next few years.

But now that I've reached some stability on the work front, I might think of a new challenge, some new projects to start, or some overall reorganisation of the goals and priorities in my life. I've been thinking of a few, some silly or ridiculous, others infeasible (at least on my own), or down right impossible ways to pass time:

• Find a way of solving any Rubik's cube in maximum 21 steps. The current proof says maximum 22 steps are needed.


• Write a socio-philosophical essay addressing some effects of globalism : economy, environment, politics, communication, pluralism, culture, migration.


• Now that, Gianfranco Gentile, a researcher of Ghent University has discovered that dark matter is needed to explain certain behavior in galaxies, it might be time to create a theory combining classic, relativistic and quantum mechanics together with dark matter.


• Work on something revolutionary to save energy, use available energy more efficiently, not only by technology, but also by a change of mentality.


• Build a render farm.


• Start beatboxing.


• Research methods of efficiently stacking solids, and by extension, deformable solids (f.e. a sealed bag containing a liquid).

But some are more realistic so I'll focus on those :

• Learn to solve a Rubik's Cube. This is trivial, but I would like to find it by myself.


• Pick up playing the piano again.


• Read more, by which I mean : books, literature.

Or I could just try to look for goals in my work, find a girlfriend, buy a house, get married, start a family and raise some children.

Google 3.0 : The future of internet searching

In the future, search engine Google will look like a combination of Google and Wikipedia. When you search for something on Google, you will get a wikipedia-like explanation of the term you are looking up and a list of categories to further refine your search, rather than a list of most relevant links, as you get now.
The links won't disappear completely, you will still be able to visit relevant web pages, but the links to these sites are highlighted words in the explaining text or in the biography, or 'See also' section, at the end of the small article.

The content for the small article and the categories isn't provided and edited by a community of people sharing knowledge, but is derived from all information that is accessible, like webpages and digital libraries. For this to work, an algorithm (computer program) is needed that can scan documents, articles, blogposts and webpages and understand what it is about. Some people call this AI, or Artificial Intelligence, others would define this to be base of the semantic web.
Rather than looking for the occurance of search terms in the indexes of all webpages, the search sites of the future would understand what the search is about and answer what it 'remembers' about it, after 'reading' and 'understanding' all available sources on the internet.

I'm not affiliated with Google or any other company offering internet search services. What I described is my vision on the future of websearching and looking for information. My vision is much like, and is probably influenced by, the view of Tim Berners-Lee, one of the founders of the internet, on web 3.0 and the semantic web :

I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
(Berners-Lee, Tim; Fischetti, Mark (1999). Weaving the Web. HarperSanFrancisco, chapter 12. ISBN 9780062515872)

The ability of computers to understand texts, rather than searching for occurances of words, is until now not possible. A big goal in computing was set out by Alan Turing, famous mathematician and the person who cracked the Enigma-code of the German army during the second World War.
The Turing Test defines that a computer must be able to have a conversation with a human, where the human is unable to tell wether he or she is talking to a computer or another person. A computer that passes the Turing Test is considered to be thinking, interpreting and understanding on its own.

When computers (or algorithms) could pass the Turing Test, they would be able to understand and interpret every available text and information and connecting it to other texts or concepts, just like humans would do, thus making the semantic web possible.
Until now, computers haven't passed the Turing Test, so we have to do with the current search technologies aided by human understanding, like I mentioned in Computers need help or projects like ChaCha.