The Economic Times of India

IF TOMORROW COMES

By: Vikas Kumar

Like building a Millennium Clock which is intended to last for the next 10,000 years. Can it be done? Hillis certainly thinks so, and he's already proven that by building a nine-foot prototype of the clock, which has been
on display at the Science Museum in London, England.

With over 50 US patents under his belt, Hillis is undoubtedly one of the most prolific inventors of our time. However, he has often been criticised for some of his impractical inventions, like the clock, which often make little sense to
the outside world.

But make no mistake. Hillis is no lost-in-his-own-planet kind of scientist that he appears to be. He's just concerned that that we aren't thinking too deep into the future, limiting our horizon to maybe just a few centuries or so.

One of his suggestions - prefixing an additional zero to the conventional year. So the year 2004 in Hillis' framework would read as 02004, addressing the deca-millennium bug, which would become a real problem in another 8,000 odd-years.

Much of Hillis' inventive streak can be traced back to his childhood days. Born on September 25, 1956 in Maryland, USA, Hillis spent a significant part of his early life travelling with his father, an epidemiologist, and his mother, through the jungles of Rwanda, Burundi, Kenya and Zaire in Central Africa, following outbreaks of hepatitis.

India too was a major milestone in his life. It was in Calcutta as a teenager that Hillis built with dry cell batteries, nails and plywood, a computer that could play tic-tac-toe, demonstrating his ingenuity even with scarce resources.

Today he's looking at drawing on the same mindset - the Millennium Clock - to be made of simple "bronze age" material like rock and mechanical levers and which won't need electricity.

While finishing his degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Hillis took the principle that the brain uses - 'massively parallel processing' - to develop a supercomputer in 1985, with 64,000 processors.

He named it the Connection Machine, and it became the foundation for today's supercomputers. "Clearly the organising principle of the brain is parallelism. It's using massive parallelism.

The information is in the connection between a lot of very simple parallel units working together. So if we built a computer that was more along that system of organisation, it would be likely to do the same kind of things the brain does," said Hillis.

The Connection Machine could perform simulations like predicting global climate changes and worked upto a thousand times faster than any existing computer of that time, making Hillis, then 28, the new poster boy of the information technology industry.

Hillis later served as vice-president-R&D at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow, where he developed new technologies and strategy for Disney's theme parks and other businesses.

Currently he heads an organisation called Applied Minds and also serves as chairman of the board of the Long Now Foundation, which was founded in 1996 to foster long-term thinking and responsibility, and drive projects such as the Millennium Clock.

The board of Long Now comprises a group of eminent strategists and imaginative thinkers such as Paul Saffo, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly and Peter Schwartz. Amongst his present areas of work, is the application of the principles of biological evolution to software development.

Hillis lives in Los Angeles with his wife and three children, one of whom is named India. In a 1999 Wired article, Hillis wrote, "I cannot imagine the future, but I care about it.

I know I am a part of a story that starts long before I can remember and continues long beyond when anyone will remember me. I sense that I am alive at a time of important change, and I feel a responsibility to make sure that the
change comes out well.

I plant my acorns knowing that I will never live to harvest the oaks. I have hope for the future."

Copyright 2004 The Economic Times of India, Coleman & Co Ltd