Sir Tony Hoare, British computing pioneer and senior scientist at Microsoft Research, believes the computer industry needs a “grand challenge” to inspire it.

By 2020, Hoare predicts, the world will contain 100 times as many computers as it does now, each with 100 times as much power and memory, all interconnected. And to best understand this world, he says, we should not think of it as containing many discrete computing devices, but as a global ubiquitous computer (GUC).

He argues that in this world, the classical theory of computation, based on Turing’s description of a single, localized machine sequentially executing a deterministic program to completion, no longer applies.

One of the grand challenges, then, is to re-write the basic foundations of the science, to find a theory of computation that is “more realistic than the Turing model, and can take into account the discoveries of biology, and the promise of the quantum computer.”

“An ultimate joint challenge for the biological and the computational sciences is the understanding of the mechanisms of the human brain, and its relationship with the human mind,” he adds.

“A single human brain has about a hundred million million nerve cells…and a computer program that throws light on the mind/brain problem will have to incorporate the deepest insights of biologists, neurologists, psychologists, physiologists, linguists, social scientists, and even philosophers.