MyLifeBits to Store Every Moment of Your Life 219
Dixie_dean writes "Microsoft researchers are developing a way to enable you to capture every moment of your life and store it on your computer. The principal researcher with Microsoft's research arm, Gordon Bell, is developing a way for everyone to remember those special moments. 'The nine-year project, called MyLifeBits, has Bell supplementing his own memory by collecting as much information as he can about his life. He's trying to store a lifetime on his laptop. He's gone on to collect images of every Web page he's ever visited, television shows he's watched, recorded phone conversations, and images and audio from conference sessions, along with his e-mail and instant messages. Calculating that he saves about a gigabyte of information every month, he noted that he tries to only save photos of a megabyte or less. Bell figures one could store everything about his life, from start to finish, using a terabyte of storage." This is a project we've been talking about for a long time.
Copyright Infringement (Score:5, Interesting)
Wait till he gets his first subpoena (Score:2, Interesting)
SciFi idea.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Not really ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Not really ... (Score:3, Interesting)
Alan Turing, in his 1950 paper Computing machinery and intelligence [abelard.org], where he discusses the question of whether machines can think, and where he introduces the Turing Test, says (section 7):
10^10 bits is 1.25 gigabytes, 10^15 bits is 125 terabytes. The former seems ridiculously small to me too, the latter would equate to 82kB/second, based on your calculation. Now would that be enough, you think?
I'm not even sure the question makes a lot of sense, actually. I don't picture the human memory as a discrete one (Turing discusses this too in his article, BTW), where information can be measured in terms of how many "storage units" it uses. I don't think a single memory, say the smell of my friend's uncle's basement when we were kids, could be extracted from my brain, taken out of any context, and measured to find out how many "bits" it uses.
The problem would also be, obviously, that we don't know how to represent all this data in binary form. Which "format" do you use? AI researchers have been trying to build ontologies that cover all of knowledge, computational linguists try to build grammars that fully describe a language, and both goals are mostly unattained yet.
Turing goes on to quote:
So he estimates that the human brain holds less information than an encyclopedia. I find that hard to believe. The encyclopedia sure holds more facts than I'll ever remember, but how about habits, skills, things I could never fully describe into words, but that I undoubtedly hold in memory?
It should also be kept in mind that in Turing's time there were no compilers, and programmers like him actually coded by manipulating bit sequences. So no wonder estimating the size of such large databases was hard for them.
Anyway Turing's paper is a rather fascinating read, I highly recommend it to any programmer or CS student.