This science fiction technology is based in fact, and not so far off. Of course, Vince Duby is the character that brings it all into reality.
Before he realized it, Vince said, "Sure, in my workshop I’ve got a solar assisted bike with a solar powered gyro computer, and an ultralite that can ..." He stopped suddenly, remembering the reactions of the few other people he had mentioned this kind of thing to. (pg 75)
... what they lack is enough engineers to build everything
... they are also constantly at war, which hampers progress
... assimilation drugs gradually change the Breeze physically into the conquered species
... transcomps needed for communication between species
... Skoleme moon mashers
... solar sails
Gerry uses Madame Flora to read fortunes with tarot cards, and to play the online Game
... he buys the original machine at a flea market, along with the components to convert her into a simple AI/robot.
... over time the brains, the neural network grows, easily scaled up by added circuit boards
... it does not get as large as that developed by VIA Inc, but I can make either of them as large as I need as the real state of the art advances
... artificial neural networks (ANN) or connectionist systems are computing systems that are inspired by, but not identical to, biological neural networks that constitute animal brains.
... we're now (Dec 22, 2017) close to the frog brain size, i.e. the order of magnitude of 10^7, or more.
NASHVILLE, Tenn., July 6, 2015 – Digital Reasoning, a leader in cognitive computing, announced it has trained the largest neural network in the world to date with a stunning 160 billion parameters. Google’s previous record was 11.2 billion, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory recently trained a neural network with 15 billion parameters.
The iCub is the humanoid robot developed at IIT as part of the EU project RobotCub and subsequently adopted by more than 20 laboratories worldwide. It has 53 motors that move the head, arms & hands, waist, and legs. It can see and hear, it has the sense of proprioception (body configuration) and movement (using accelerometers and gyroscopes). We are working to improve on this in order to give the iCub the sense of touch and to grade how much force it exerts on the environment.
... money and computer games: Game Co., Inc has Danger Arena (classic shooter), and Pharaohs Secret Temple in the casinos in Atlantic City ... seem to have crude graphics
... Research in 04/2019 showed speech could be recognized from reading brain waves
... Mindwave headset is the one I have used, and I was amazed that it worked. I still have a lot of research to do on this.
Quantum neural networks (QNNs) are neural network models which are based on the principles of quantum mechanics
... instead of using magnetic or microwave pulses, she hopes to use molecules that use optical frequencies as input and output signals. [Chemistry World]