From “konkaka” Child's Workshop In Accra To The Forefront Of Bio-engineering (1)

A machine that may help blind people to see?
What about a computer that can mimic the action of the brain and be able to process the zillions of information that passes through the brain, as it controls our bodily functions and actions, while using only a tiny proportion of the power now needed by the super-computers that attempt to make a tiny fraction of such calculations?

Super-computers necessarily cost huge amounts of money today – largely because of the enormous amounts of electrical energy they consume – and are therefore unaffordable, except to the richest governments on earth. If the power requirements of super-computers were to be reduced exponentially to the same level as that which operates your brain and mine, can you visualise how that would transform the world in which we live?

Think of your first computer and what it could, or could not do. Compare it to your current machine, with its multi-tasking capabilities and its refusal to crash! Then think again, and think again and think again and think again!

A computer “with as much number-crunching ability as the human brain would devour around sixty million watts of electricity — equal to a hydroelectric power plant”, says one scientific writer. Trying to build computers that are “way more efficient” is the task that a group of bio-engineers at Stanford University, in the USA, have set themselves. And that group is headed by a Ghanaian!

He is 53-year-old Kwabena Adu Boahen, son of the late Professor Albert Kwadwo Adu Boahen, one of Africa's foremost historians. Now, a lot of hype surrounds the work that is being carried out at Silicon Valley and other places, with regard to robotics, artificial intelligence and related developments in the computer industry. So, a little scepticism is in order when we hear of using machines to enable the blind to see, or putting the equivalent of a human brain inside a computer to direct how it works. But I assure you that Kwabena Boahen's endeavours are the real thing.

His work has been featured in The New York Times, Esquire, The Scientific American, The Economist and The London Guardian, among numerous other authoritative publications. Yet he is almost unknown in his own country! Well, I am very glad to introduce him to you.

Kwabena Boahen's fascination with building things started when he was very young. He commandeered a section of his father's bungalow, where there was an unused table, and turned it into his “workshop”. The noise he made there earned it a nickname in the Professor's household – the “konkaka” place. Dinner time: “Where is Kwabena?” …. Answer: “He's making konkaka!” Professor Adu Boahen did not marvel at his son's preoccupation with making things with his hands, for his own first love had been mathematics, not the history that earned him his unsurpassed reputation. He gave Kwabena his head – and the rest is history.

Born on 22 September 1964, Kwabena was educated at Legon Primary School, from where he followed his father's footsteps to Mfantsipim School. He was, in his own words, a “centenary greenhorn” there, having been admitted in 1976, the year the School celebrated its centenary. After obtaining his “O” levels, he went to the Presbyterian Boys Secondary School ( Presec) in Accra for his sixth-form studies. It was there that he began to develop his inventiveness to a noticeable level – he produced a corn-planting machine that won a prize at the National Science Fair in 1979. His prize was a trip to Nigeria – the envy of his classmates.

But even before then, he had begun his love-hate relationship with computers. Addressing a world audience on TEDGlobal, a TV programme that provides a platform for thinkers to share their ideas with like-minded individuals (June 2007) Kwabena revealed: “I got my first computer when I was a teenager growing up in Accra. It was a really cool device: you could play games with it; you could programme it in BASIC. And I was fascinated. So I went to the library to figure out: how did this thing work?

“I read about how the CPU is constantly shuffling data back and forth between the memory, the RAM and the ALU, (the arithmetic and logic unit. ) And I thought to myself, this CPU really has to work like crazy just to keep all this data moving through the system.

“But nobody was really worried about this. When computers were first introduced, they were said to be a million times faster than neurons. People were really excited. They thought they would soon outstrip the capacity of the brain. This is a quote, actually, from Alan Turing: "In 30 years, it will be as easy to ask a computer a question as to ask a person." This was in 1946. And now [in 2007], it's still not true. And so, the question is, why aren't we really seeing this kind of power in computers that we see in the brain?”

Kwabena answers his own question: “What people didn't realize, and I'm just beginning to realize [myself] right now, is that we pay a huge price for the speed that we claim is a big advantage of these computers. Let's take a look at some numbers. ...Blue Gene [is] the fastest computer in the world [in 2007]. It's got 120,000 processors; they can basically process 10 quadrillion bits of information per second. That's 10 to the sixteenth. And they consume one and a half megawatts of power.

“So that would be really great, if you could add that to the production capacity in Tanzania. It would really boost the economy. [But] just to go back to the United States, if you translate the amount of power or electricity this computer uses to the amount of households in the States, you get 1,200 households in the U.S.!That's how much power this computer uses.

“Now, let's compare this with the brain..... How much computation does the brain do? I estimate 10 to the 16 bits per second, which is actually about very similar to what Blue Gene does. So that's the question.... how much? -- they are doing a similar amount of processing; a similar amount of data -- the question is how much energy or electricity does the brain use?

“And the answer [is] actually as much as your laptop computer: it's just 10 watts! So what we are doing right now with computers with the energy consumed by 1,200 houses, the brain is doing with the energy consumed by your laptop! So the question is, how is the brain able to achieve this kind of efficiency? ....The bottom line [is]: the brain processes information using 100,000 times less energy than we do right now with this computer technology that we have. How is the brain able to do this?”

To be Contd.