Interesting to see the trend continue towards spherical tokamaks.
Also, when it comes to fusion, I suspect we'd be much closer to fusion energy generation if the bulk of funding hadn't been put into a single basket (the tokomak approach). There are promising fusion approaches that are closer to achieving net energy from fusion than tokomaks that are massively underfunded in comparison.
While I agree there should be more funding for non-tokomak projects, this is simply not true. JET has reached 70% of breakeven and JT60 in Japan reached "theoretical" breakeven (if it had tritium). Nothing else has ever gotten close.
The following is taken from an article published on June 2016...
http://lppfusion.com/git-12-z-pinch-achieves-6-joule-fusion-...
"GIT-12 Z-Pinch Achieves 6 Joule Fusion Output with Deuterium Fuel"
"Z-pinch devices are closely related to plasma focus devices in that they also use the currents through the plasma itself, not external magnets, to produce the strong magnetic forces that confine hot plasma. In a z-pinch, however, the current flows between two electrodes in a line, rather than the plasma focus’s concentric electrodes. At the Prague conference, Russian and Eastern European physicists announced new experiments with the powerful GIT-12 z-pinch. They used a configuration in which the plasma was arranged in two concentric rings, puffed into the gap between the electrodes right before the discharge. Nearly 6 J of fusion energy (producing 6×1012 neutrons) were released with a 3 MA current and 3 MJ of input energy to the device. Since only 500 kJ of energy was released from the capacitor bank prior to the pinch, the ratio of 1.2 J of fusion per 100 kJ of input rivaled or slightly surpassed the best results obtained in either plasma focus devices or tokamaks, both of which are close to 1 J per 100 KJ input."
The implication is that both Z-Pinch and DPF devices are close to tokamaks in terms of energy efficiency, based on the experiments performed to date. Do you disagree with this? If so, why?
> 1.2 J of fusion per 100 kJ
That's a "Q" value of 0.00001. Tokamaks have reached Q=0.7.
Were people in ~1955 really so naive as to believe we'll have complete AI by 1975? Outside of science fiction writers, of course.
The golden years 1956–1974
The years after the Dartmouth conference were an era of discovery, of sprinting across new ground. The programs that were developed during this time were, to most people, simply "astonishing": computers were solving algebra word problems, proving theorems in geometry and learning to speak English.
Few at the time would have believed that such "intelligent" behavior by machines was possible at all. Researchers expressed an intense optimism in private and in print, predicting that a fully intelligent machine would be built in less than 20 years.
That brings the earliest predictions to the range 1976-1994.
http://aiimpacts.org/category/ai-timelines/predictions-of-hu... has better data. It puts the earliest prediction at 1978 (but also has one predicting 1973-1985). Apparently, Minsky, in 1967, predicted "within a generation"
(Textual description of the part of their dataset that includes reasoning as to how the prediction was reached at http://aiimpacts.org/list-of-analyses-of-time-to-human-level.... That list is a bit less optimistic. Excel sheets for the full dataset also are available from that site)
If you've just made the most complicated computer system (see e.g. the General Problem Solver), it's easy to believe that you just need to pile on some more complexity until you have a thinking thing.