John Koza has made a serious breakthrough when it comes to the computing power of today and our hopes for it in the future. Studying computers since his high school tutelage in the 1950s, Koza was a man who yearned to make advancements in the world around him. As a clear example of his ingenuity, he was unable to afford a computer while in high school, since the mainframes of the time took up entire rooms and cost far more than the modern day computer. To that end, John assembled bits and pieces from the gadgets around him, and with parts from old pinball machines and jukeboxes, he found himself with a computer that could accurately compute what day of the week a certain date would fall on.
John’s latest invention far surpasses his date-decoding computer of the fifties. Utilizing 1,000 networked computers operating in tandem, his new device uses genetic programming to solve problems. Essentially, what the machine does is follow Darwin’s laws of survival of the fittest – it compiles code, tests it against other code, and thereby determines the most accurate usage of code. And the machine wasn’t built with one purpose in mind; instead, it utilizes...