Supercomputers and Three-Year-Olds

Al Trivelpiece

Alvin W. Trivelpiece is a Vice President of Martin Marietta Energy Systems, Inc., and the Director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He received his B.S. from California Polytechnic State College-San Luis Obispo, and his M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech. During his professional career, Dr. Trivelpiece has been a Professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Maryland-College Park, Vice President of Engineering and Research at Maxwell Laboratories, Corporate Vice President at Scientific Applications Incorporated, Director of the Office of Energy Research for the Department of Energy, and Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

I always enjoy coming to the Southwest, as many of you do. There is something that people who live here sort of forget, and that is that when you step outside at night and you look up, you see a lot of stars. They're very clear and bright, just as if they are painted on the sky.

Ancient humans must have done the same thing. That is, after they skinned the last sabertooth of the day, they looked up at the sky to see all those stars. Among those people there must have been a few who were as smart as Richard Feynman. Some of them probably had the same IQ that Feynman had. It must have been very frustrating for them because they lacked the tools to answer the questions that must have occurred to them. What things we now recognize as planets, moons, meteors, and comets were phenomena they could only wonder about. But eventually

some of them persuaded colleagues to join them and build Stonehenge (early "big science") and other kinds of observatories. These were some of the early tools.

As time has gone by, tools have included ships that permitted exploring what was on the other side of the water, transport that enabled travelers to cross deserts, and eventually, vehicles that allowed humans to go into space and deep into the ocean. Tools are also those things that permit the intellectual exercises that involve going into the interior of the atom, its nucleus, and the subparts thereof.

All of that has been made available by, in a sense, one of the most enduring human characteristics, and that is curiosity. Beyond the need to survive, I think, what drives us more than any other single thing is curiosity. But curiosity can't be satisfied. Ancient man couldn't figure out what was on the inside of an atom, but with the right kind of an accelerator, you can. However, as the tools have come along, they've led to new questions that weren't previously asked.

You, the computer manufacturers, are in the process of developing some truly spectacular tools. Where is all that going to go? One of the things that you are going to need is customers. So I want to just talk for a few minutes about one of the customer bases that you're going to have to pay attention to. I ask you to imagine that it's the year 2000 and that in 1997 a child was born. The child is now three years old. I pick a three-year-old because I think that when you're three years old, that's the last time in your life that you're a true intellectual. The reason I believe this is because at that particular stage a three-year-old asks a question "Why?" for no other reason than the desire to know the answer. Anybody who has been the parent of a three-year-old has put up with a zillion of these questions. I won't try to recite the string; you all know them.

That curiosity, however, is fragile. Something rather unfortunate seems to happen to that curiosity as the child gets a little older. Children reach the third grade, and now you direct them to draw a picture of a fireman, a policeman, a scientist. What do you get? A lady named Shirley Malcolm, who works at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, has a remarkable collection of pictures by third graders who were asked to draw a scientist. What do these pictures look like? Let me just tell you, these are usually people you wouldn't want to be. These are bad-looking, Einstein-like critters who are doing bad things to other people, the environment, or animals. That's your customer base. Incidentally, there's another set of pictures that I've never seen, but they're supposed to be from a similar study done in the Soviet Union, and what

those children drew were people being picked up in limos and driven to their dachas.

Most of you have heard about the education demographics in the United States. Eighty-five per cent of the work force between now and the year 2000 is going to be minorities and women; they have not traditionally chosen to pursue careers in science and technology. We have as a result a rather interesting and, I think, a serious problem.

Now, how might you go about fixing that? Well, maybe one way is for every three-year-old to get a terminal and at government expense, get access to a global network. The whole world's information, literally, would be available. This can be done by the year 2000. If this were to occur, what would the classroom of the 21st century look like? I believe it starts with a three-year-old, a three-year-old who gets access to an information base that permits, in that very peculiar way that a three-year-old goes about things, skipping from one thing to another—language, animals, mathematics, sex, whatever. Three-year-olds have a curiosity that just simply doesn't know any particular bounds. Somehow the system that we currently have converts that curiosity into an absolute hostility toward intellectual pursuits. This seems to occur between the third year and third grade.

So, I believe that the distinction between home and classroom is probably going to be very much blurred. Home and classroom will not look significantly different. The terminals may be at home, the terminals may be in schools, they may be very cheap, and they may be ubiquitous. And the question is, how will they be used?

What about the parents between now and then? I suspect that the parents of these children, born in 1997 and three years old in the year 2000, are going to be very poorly equipped. I don't know what we can do about that. But I have a feeling that if you get the right tools in the hands of these three-year-olds in the year 2000, a lot of the customer base that you are counting on will eventually be available. Remember that you, the computer developers and vendors, have a vision. But, unless you do something to help educate the people needed to take advantage of that vision, the vision simply will not exist. So you have a serious problem in this regard.

Think also of children who are disabled in some way—blind, dyslexic, autistic, or deaf. You can make available to these children in their homes or schools through the information bases an ability to overcome whatever disabilities they might have. High-performance computing might provide one means to help in a broad-based campaign to overcome large collections of disabilities.

Thus, I think one of the questions is a rhetorical question. Rather than leaving you with an answer, I leave you with some questions. Because high-performance computing is going to have an impact on the classroom of the 21st century, you have to ask, what is that impact going to be? And how are you going to prepare for it?