Human or Computer? Take This Test

Dr. Turing suggested that a machine could be said to think if the human interrogator could not distinguish it from the other human. He went on to predict that by 2000, computers would be able to fool the average interrogator over five minutes of questioning at least 30 percent of the time.

Although the Turing test, as it is now called, spawned a vibrant field of research known as artificial intelligence, his prediction has proved false. Today's computers are capable of feats Dr. Turing never imagined, yet in many simple tasks, a typical 5-year-old can outperform the most powerful computers.

Indeed, the abilities that require much of what is usually described as intelligence, like medical diagnosis or playing chess, have proved far easier for computers than seemingly simpler abilities: those requiring vision, hearing, language or motor control.

''Abilities like vision are the result of billions of years of evolution and difficult for us to understand by introspection, whereas abilities like multiplying two numbers are things we were explicitly taught and can readily express in a computer program,'' said Dr. Jitendra Malik, a professor specializing in computer vision at the University of California at Berkeley.

Dr. Manuel Blum, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon who took part in the Yahoo conference, realized that the failures of artificial intelligence might provide exactly the solution Yahoo needed. Why not devise a new sort of Turing test, he suggested, that would be simple for humans but would baffle sophisticated computer programs.

Dr. Manber liked the idea, so with his Ph.D. student Luis von Ahn and others Dr. Blum devised a collection of cognitive puzzles based on the challenging problems of artificial intelligence. The puzzles have the property that computers can generate and grade the tests even though they cannot pass them. The researchers decided to call their puzzles Captchas, an acronym for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart (on the Web at www.captcha.net).

One puzzle, called Gimpy, consists of a display of seven distorted, overlapping words chosen at random from a dictionary of simple words. Solving the puzzle requires identifying three of the seven words and typing them into the box provided. The Carnegie Mellon group also created a simplified version of Gimpy -- a single distorted word displayed against a complicated background. It is now part of Yahoo's registration process.

Another Captcha, called Sounds, consists of a distorted, computer-generated sound clip containing a word or sequence of numbers. To solve the puzzle, a user must listen to the clip and type the word or numbers into the box provided.

The idea of using puzzles to prevent automated registrations was not new. Other e-commerce sites, including the AltaVista search engine and eBay's PayPal service, were experiencing problems like Yahoo's and independently came up with Captcha-like puzzles. Through its acquisitions, Hewlett-Packard holds a patent on text-based Captchas.

Still, researchers credit Dr. Blum for the breadth of his vision. Dr. Blum ''did a great thing by recognizing that this problem is much more than solving a nuisance for Yahoo and AltaVista,'' said Dr. Andrei Broder, who helped develop the AltaVista puzzle and is now at I.B.M.

As a cryptographer, Dr. Blum was familiar with the constant efforts of cryptographic researchers to advance the field by cracking codes to discover their weaknesses.

He hoped to start a similar dynamic for Captchas, spurring researchers to try to create better Captchas while building computer programs that crack existing ones.

''Captchas are useful for companies like Yahoo, but if they're broken it's even more useful for researchers,'' Dr. Blum said. ''It's like there are two lollipops and no matter what you get one of them.''

In October Dr. Blum got his wish. Dr. Malik of Berkeley and Greg Mori, a student, devised a computer program that could crack Gimpy -- both the simple version used by Yahoo and the harder one on Captcha's Web site.

Since its inception two years ago, the Captcha effort has been building. Several research teams have joined the Captcha effort, trying to make and break Captchas and even using the ideas behind Captchas for new lines of research.

Researchers at the Palo Alto Research Center modified a program used for scanning text to create a program that could solve certain types of Yahoo-Gimpy puzzles, says Dr. Henry Baird, who was in charge of that effort. The group is also developing a new text-based Captcha called Baffletext that it hopes to license to e-commerce sites.

Inspired by the themes behind Captchas, Dr. Doug Tygar, a professor of computer science at Berkeley, and his student Monica Chew are developing alternatives to passwords that are tailored to human skills. Humans have trouble remembering long, random strings of characters, yet they excel at remembering faces and objects, noted Dr. Tygar.

Dr. Malik said he first became interested in the effort after attending a Captcha conference at the Palo Alto center in January. After he and his former student Dr. Serge Belongie, now at the University of California at San Diego, developed a new object recognition technique modeled to have some of the properties of human vision, Dr. Malik decided that Captchas were ideal for testing their method.

The Yahoo-Gimpy cracking program, written by Mr. Mori, takes a version of the easy Gimpy, a distorted word displayed in a cluttered background, and finds some points along the boundary of each letter, using standard techniques of computer vision theory.

Then, applying the Malik-Belongie method, it makes a radial chart for each point indicating where the other boundary points are in relation to it. The charts of boundary points for that letter are compared with the charts of boundary points for all 26 possible letters. The closest match is usually the correct answer.

Using various tricks to make it run faster, the program can crack an easy Gimpy puzzle in a few seconds, and it gets the right answer over 80 percent of the time.

For the harder version of Gimpy, the researchers devised a program that examines entire words instead of individual letters, so its performance is in minutes rather than seconds, and it gets the puzzle right only about a third of the time. Still, the program will need on average only three tries to get the right answer.

Dr. Malik and Mr. Mori are exploring ways of improving the performance of their program on Gimpy that will also improve their general technique of recognizing objects in a cluttered background.

''We want to keep working on this in a principled way so we can use the same technique on an outdoor scene with buildings, trees and cars,'' Dr. Malik said.

The general technique, he said, will have many practical applications, like automated recognition of military targets or detection of trademark infringements on the Internet.

Meanwhile, Yahoo will have to install a new Captcha that is resistant to Dr. Mori's program. This task will fall to Dr. Manber's successor, since Dr. Manber moved to a new position last month as chief algorithms officer for Amazon.com. There, he said, he plans to continue his collaborations with academic researchers.

''I'd love to foster more cooperation between industry and academica,'' he said. ''It's great for everybody.''

State of the Art: Review: Apple’s New Mac Pro Computer

Atop my desk sits a shiny (and I do mean shiny) new Mac Pro. It’s Apple’s top-of-the-line new desktop computer, aimed at, as the name implies, the creative professionals who have always relied on Macs for video, graphics, music and photo manipulation. It makes everything around it look vaguely slower. It also makes me want to increase my homeowner’s insurance, in case of a break-in. The Mac Pro is daring, extravagant and elite -- or maybe it’s just for the elite.

The design is obviously an indulgence. The Mac Pro is a charcoal gray cylinder that stands about 10 inches high and reflects back a distorted, slightly menacing view of the world. The outer layer of the tube is removable, displaying the Pro’s innards in a pleasing industrial array. A cutout at the top of the cylinder creates a lip that acts as a handle, and a visual effect sadly reminiscent of either a trash can or an ashtray.

Its affect is deeply futuristic: It looks like a device that might project a hologram, or generate its own singularity. Its blenderlike size makes it suitable for sitting atop a desk, particularly a lucite desk in an ultramodern sparse loft, or on black aluminum in an ultra-stylish ad agency, graphic design shop or documentary film studio.

Side note: Apple told me it considers the Mac Pro to be a “portable” desktop; many pro video and graphics editors prefer to travel with their editing rigs. As it happens, I got to test that claim: I picked up my review unit in New York and, later that afternoon, flew to San Francisco with it. Let’s just say that an 11 pound cylinder, handle or no, isn’t the most wieldy of travel companions.

The Mac Pro is extremely, ridiculously fast and powerful. The specifications are nearly mythical. The model Apple loaned me has an eight-core Intel processor; you can max out at 12. It has 64 gigabytes of extremely fast memory (most computers have four, eight, or maybe 16); two AMD graphics cards that purchased separately, cost $800 each; and a luxurious and fast one terabyte solid-state hard drive. As configured, and without a monitor or even a keyboard and mouse, which are not included, the Mac Pro sitting on my desk rings in at $8,099. Shipping is free.

Once it’s running, the Mac Pro is virtually silent, and only a ports panel that illuminates when you move the machine offers any sign of life.

Nevertheless, the power is evident. The Pro took just over an hour to convert 32 gigabytes of high-definition video into another video format -- a job that took over three hours on my quad-core Mac Mini. And although the task noticeably heated up the Mac Pro, its fan stayed quiet, and it didn’t seem perturbed. It’s clearly capable of much more than a mere multimedia professional can throw at it. But I had more in store.

The target market of professionals for the new Mac Pro has felt neglected in recent years. The last time they got a new Mac Pro desktop was 2010, with a minor speed bump in 2012. That year, Apple quietly killed the 17-inch MacBook Pro laptop, a favorite of creative pros who wanted an truly portable editing rig.

Meanwhile, Apple’s most recent edition of its Final Cut video editing software, Final Cut Pro X, disappointed many with missing features and a prettier, but dumber interface. Subsequent updates answered these sorts of complaints, and the software was just updated to support the new Mac Pro and, most important, ultra high-definition video manipulation.

Apple clearly hopes the new Mac Pro will both appease its creative base and lay claim to so-called 4K video editing just as it’s poised to become more mainstream. This video resolution has twice the vertical and horizontal resolution of high-definition video, for much more detailed picture quality. It’s the new darling of movie studios, graphic designers and ad agencies, and 4K (and even 5K, 6K and 8K) cameras are increasingly available to prosumers and even consumers. The land grab is on.

The Mac Pro offers, in theory, the graphics and processor power to make editing and rendering 4K video feasible -- although Apple doesn’t yet make a monitor capable of displaying 4K. It offers the Mac Pro on its own site alongside a Sharp monitor that costs $3,595.

I invited a friend who does freelance graphic design and video editing to come over with some 4K and 5K video he had shot. We imported the footage into Final Cut Pro X to test Apple’s claims of editing in real time, without long delays in rendering and processing video.

Bits Blog: A Day to Remember the First Computer Programmer Was a Woman

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Researchers Build a Working Carbon Nanotube Computer

In a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the researchers reported that they had successfully built a working computer — albeit an extremely simple one — entirely from transistors fashioned from carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes, which are cylinder-shaped molecules, have long held the promise of allowing smaller, faster and lower-powered computing, though they have proved difficult to work with.

The Stanford Robust Systems Group, however, has made significant progress in the last 18 months, advancing from building individual carbon nanotube transistors to simple electronic circuits made by interconnecting the transistors, and this week to a complete computer made from an ensemble of just 142 low-power transistors.

While Stanford’s prototype computer is assembled from transistors that are gargantuan by industry standards — one micron vs. 22 nanometers — it is what computer scientists refer to as a “Turing complete” machine, meaning that it is capable of performing any computation, given enough time.

“It can run two programs concurrently, a counting program and a sorting program,” said H. S. Philip Wong, a Stanford University electrical engineer, and one of the leaders of the group. “We’ve spent a tremendous amount of time on this; in fact we’ve spent two generations of students on this.”

The computer is based on a subset of 20 of the instructions used by the commercial MIPS microprocessor, which itself was designed by a group of Stanford researchers led by Stanford’s current president, John Hennessy, during the 1980s.

“I think this is a really nice piece of work,” said Supratik Guha, director of physical sciences at I.B.M.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center. “It’s a rudimentary demonstration that carbon nanotubes can be used to build a universal computer, or a Turing-complete machine. This is not the most efficient computer, but that wasn’t the point. It’s one of the first steps.”

Because the factory processes that underlie the modern semiconductor industry require such painstaking precision, any new technology that the industry might use must be perfected more than three years before it can be considered for use in commercial production.

Carbon nanotubes have continued to excite the material science field because of their proliferating array of allotropes — different forms of the material — all with potential. Dr. Guha complimented the Stanford group for maintaining its focus on a single engineering advance.

Currently, semiconductor industry leaders can make integrated silicon circuits with a feature size of 22 nanometers, roughly 4,000 of which could be spread across the width of a human hair. With the arrival of a new generation of smaller transistors roughly every two years, the industry generally believes that silicon will be scaled down to a limit of 5-nanometer transistors sometime after 2020.

The constant shrinking of transistor size over the last half-century has been important because it has significantly lowered the cost of computing, making it possible to build ever more powerful computers that are faster and cheaper, and consume less power with each generation.

While Intel has been generally circumspect about what material technology it plans to turn to when silicon ceases to “scale” down to smaller transistor sizes, I.B.M. has been more vocal and optimistic about the potential for carbon nanotubes.

The company has recently succeeded in creating an inverter, a basic logic element used in electronic circuits, using two different types of carbon nanotube transistors, and plans to demonstrate the device at a technical meeting at the end of the year.

The researchers said that their advance was not a scientific breakthrough, but it was a significant demonstration of the ability to work with a material other than silicon with great precision.

They also stressed that their research project was entirely compatible with industry-standard manufacturing processes based on silicon. This suggests that in the future it will be possible to build hybrid chips using carbon nanotubes at particular locations, and thus extend the life of silicon in computing.

The researchers said they were proud of their tiny prototype.

“This is a general computer and we can do anything with it,” said Max Shulaker, a Stanford graduate student who is a leading member of the research group. “We could in principle run 64-bit Windows, but it would take millions of years.”

Q&A: Cooking With a New Computer

Taste Largely Decides

Choice of Computer

Q. My wife would like to put together a keepsake family cookbook of her best recipes but needs a new computer first. We currently have a PC, but would a Mac or a new Windows model work best, and with most cookbook programs?

A. Unless you need to run a specific program that works on only one type of operating system, the decision between a Mac or a Windows computer comes down to personal preferences and how much money you wish to spend. Windows-based PCs tend to be less expensive, and if you have been using Windows you would probably have less of a learning curve — as well as an easier time transferring files and other data from your old machine to the new one.

Apple’s Mac computers may cost a little more upfront, but have their devotees for elegant software and ease of use. Things are shifting, but Macs are still generally less of a target for malicious software as well.

Although the Mac may require some getting used to after years of Windows, the latest version of Microsoft’s operating system — Windows 8 — is noticeably different from previous versions of the software. If you can, you may want to go to a store that sells both types of computers and try out each one. (With extra software, a Mac computer can also run Windows if you cannot decide which to choose.)

Since both systems can easily handle standard tasks like e-mail, Web browsing, word processing and displaying photo, audio and video files, the cookbook software you like best may be a deciding factor. Some cookbook creation and printing services (like makethefamilycookbook.com or familycookbookproject.com) are Web-based and work on both systems, as does desktop software like Cook’n. Other programs, like Living Cookbook, are Windows-only.

Voice Memos

In Extra Large

Q. I used the Voice Memos app on the iPhone to record three hours of audio, but when I try to e-mail the file to myself, the app says it can only send a shortened version. I don’t sync my phone with iTunes, so is there a way to copy this recording to my Mac?

A. If Apple’s iTunes-syncing solution does not work for you, there are alternatives. One method is to use a third-party app like iExplorer for Mac or iFunBox for Windows and Mac to browse the files on the phone and copy the ones you need to the computer.

For future large voice memos, there are apps like DropVox which records the audio and sends it right to an online Dropbox account for easy retrieval. And if you ever decide to try out iTunes, voice memos are automatically copied back to the computer’s audio library when you have the “Include voice memos” option selected on the Music tab.

TIP OF THE WEEK To help protect your Facebook account, you can turn on the login approvals option in your settings, which requires that a special code be sent to your phone when you log in from a new computer. But even if you do not have a cell signal when you use Facebook from a new machine, you can still use the company’s mobile app on your Android handset or iPhone to get the necessary security code.

In the Facebook app, tap the top left menu icon. In the iPhone version, flick down the screen, tap Code Generator and follow the steps on screen to grab the numeric code you need to log in. In the Android version, tap Account and then Code Generator from the top left menu button. Tap the Activate option and wait a minute or two to receive the code required to get into your Facebook account.

Personal Tech invites questions about computer-based technology to QandA @nytimes.com. This column will answer questions of general interest, but letters cannot be answered individually.

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Connecting Camera to Computer

I just got a new digital camera that came with a few discs of software. Do I need to install all this to get the photos from the camera to the computer when I connect the two?

Manufacturers often include manuals, how-to videos, utility programs and software drivers on discs when you buy a new camera, but you may not actually need to install any of it. Most modern computer operating systems automatically recognize the camera or memory card.

If you connect the camera to the computer with the USB cable and the memory card pops up as a new external drive, you can open it and copy the photo files to the hard drive manually, usually from the card’s “DCIM” folder. (If the computer does not recognize the connected camera or offer to import photos, check the manual and install the camera’s driver software.) If the computer has a built-in memory card reader, or you buy an external USB card reader, you can stick the camera’s card in the reader and copy the photos without connecting the camera.

Some discs include software for processing, editing and organizing photos imported from the camera. If you already use a program like Adobe Photoshop Elements, Google Picasa or Apple iPhoto to import pictures, you do not have to install anything new.

Douglas C. Engelbart, 1925-2013: Computer Visionary Who Invented the Mouse

Douglas C. Engelbart was 25, just engaged to be married and thinking about his future when he had an epiphany in 1950 that would change the world.

Douglas C. Engelbart with an early computer mouse in 1968, the year it was unveiled.

Clips of Douglas C. Englebart’s 1968 demonstration of a networked computing system, which included a mouse, text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing. Read more…

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A prototype of the first computer mouse, which was invented in 1964 by Dr. Engelbart and constructed by two of his associates.

He had a good job working at a government aerospace laboratory in California, but he wanted to do something more with his life, something of value that might last, even outlive him. Then it came to him. In a single stroke he had what might be safely called a complete vision of the information age.

The epiphany spoke to him of technology’s potential to expand human intelligence, and from it he spun out a career that indeed had lasting impact. It led to a host of inventions that became the basis for the Internet and the modern personal computer.

In later years, one of those inventions was given a warmhearted name, evoking a small, furry creature given to scurrying across flat surfaces: the computer mouse.

Dr. Engelbart died on Tuesday at 88 at his home in Atherton, Calif. His wife, Karen O’Leary Engelbart, said the cause was kidney failure.

Computing was in its infancy when Dr. Engelbart entered the field. Computers were ungainly room-size calculating machines that could be used by only one person at a time. Someone would feed them information in stacks of punched cards and then wait hours for a printout of answers. Interactive computing was a thing of the future, or in science fiction. But it was germinating in Dr. Engelbart’s restless mind.

In his epiphany, he saw himself sitting in front of a large computer screen full of different symbols — an image most likely derived from his work on radar consoles while in the Navy after World War II. The screen, he thought, would serve as a display for a workstation that would organize all the information and communications for a given project.

It was his great insight that progress in science and engineering could be greatly accelerated if researchers, working in small groups, shared computing power. He called the approach “bootstrapping” and believed it would raise what he called their “collective I.Q.”

A decade later, during the Vietnam War, he established an experimental research group at Stanford Research Institute (later renamed SRI and then SRI International). The unit, the Augmentation Research Center, known as ARC, had the financial backing of the Air Force, NASA and the Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department. Even so, in the main, computing industry professionals regarded Dr. Engelbart as a quixotic outsider.

In December 1968, however, he set the computing world on fire with a remarkable demonstration before more than a thousand of the world’s leading computer scientists at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco, one of a series of national conferences in the computer field that had been held since the early 1950s. Dr. Engelbart was developing a raft of revolutionary interactive computer technologies and chose the conference as the proper moment to unveil them.

For the event, he sat on stage in front of a mouse, a keyboard and other controls and projected the computer display onto a 22-foot-high video screen behind him. In little more than an hour, he showed how a networked, interactive computing system would allow information to be shared rapidly among collaborating scientists. He demonstrated how a mouse, which he invented just four years earlier, could be used to control a computer. He demonstrated text editing, video conferencing, hypertext and windowing.

In contrast to the mainframes then in use, a computerized system Dr. Engelbart created, called the oNLine System, or NLS, allowed researchers to share information seamlessly and to create and retrieve documents in the form of a structured electronic library.

The conference attendees were awe-struck. In one presentation, Dr. Engelbart demonstrated the power and the potential of the computer in the information age. The technology would eventually be refined at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center and at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Apple and Microsoft would transform it for commercial use in the 1980s and change the course of modern life.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 3, 2013

An earlier version of this article misstated the original name of the research group SRI International. It was Stanford Research Institute, not Stanford Research International. It also misidentified one of Mr. Engelbart’s inventions. What he called “the bug” is now known as the cursor, not the mouse.

New Computer Attacks Come From Iran, Officials Say

The targets have included several American oil, gas and electricity companies, which government officials have refused to identify. The goal is not espionage, they say, but sabotage. Government officials describe the attacks as probes looking for ways to seize control of critical processing systems.

Investigators began looking at the attacks several months ago, and when the Department of Homeland Security issued a vaguely worded warning this month, a government official told The New York Times that “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.”

Government officials and outside experts on Friday confirmed a report in The Wall Street Journal that the source of the attacks had been narrowed to Iran. They said the evidence was not specific enough to conclude with confidence that the attacks were state-sponsored, but control over the Internet is so centralized in Iran that they said it was hard to imagine the attacks being done without government knowledge.

While the attackers have been unsuccessful to date, they have made enough progress to prompt the Homeland Security warning, which compared the latest threat to the computer virus that hit Saudi Aramco, the world’s largest oil producer, last year. After investigations, American officials concluded that the Aramco attack, and a subsequent one at RasGas, the Qatari energy company, were the work of Iran.

Taken together, officials say, the attacks suggest that Iran’s hacking skills have improved over the past 18 months. The Obama administration has been focused on Iran because the attacks have given the Iranian government a way to retaliate for tightened economic sanctions against it, and for the American and Israeli program that aimed similar attacks, using a virus known as Stuxnet, on the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant.

That effort, code-named Olympic Games, slowed Iran’s progress for months, but also prompted it to create what Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps calls a cyber corps to defend the country.

This week Iran denied being the source of any attacks, and said it had been a victim of American sabotage. In a letter to the editor of The Times, responding to a May 12 article that reported on the new attacks’ similarity to the Saudi Aramco episode, Alireza Miryousefi, the head of the press office of the Iranian mission to the United Nations, wrote that Iran “never engaged in such attacks against its Persian Gulf neighbors, with which Iran has maintained good neighborly relations.”

“Unfortunately, wrongful acts such as authorizing the 2010 Stuxnet attack against Iran have set a bad, and dangerous, precedent in breach of certain principles of international law,” he wrote.

American officials have not offered any technical evidence to back up their assertions of Iranian authorship of the latest attacks, but they describe the recent campaign as different from most attacks against American companies — particularly those from China — which quietly siphon off intellectual property for competitive purposes.

The new attacks, officials say, were devised to destroy data and manipulate the machinery that operates critical control systems, like oil pipelines. One official described them as “probes that suggest someone is looking at how to take control of these systems.”

The White House would not confirm that Iran was the source, but Laura Lucas, a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, said that “mitigating threats in cyberspace, whether theft of intellectual property or intrusions against our critical infrastructure” was a governmentwide initiative and that the United States would consider “all of the measures at its disposal — from diplomatic to law enforcement to economic — when determining how to protect our nation, allies, partners, and interests in cyberspace.”

In the past, government officials have privately warned companies under threat. But Homeland Security was able to issue a broader warning because of an executive order, signed in February, promoting greater information sharing about such threats between the government and private companies that oversee the nation’s critical infrastructure.

An agency called ICS-Cert, which monitors attacks on computer systems that run industrial processes, issued the warning. It said the government was “highly concerned about hostility against critical infrastructure organizations,” and included a link to a previous warning about Shamoon, the virus used in the Saudi Aramco attack last year.

That attack prompted Leon E. Panetta, then defense secretary, to warn of a “cyber-Pearl Harbor” if the United States did not take the threat seriously.

Saudi Aramco and RasGas both said that the attackers had failed in their efforts to infiltrate their oil production systems.

Government officials also say Iran was the source of a separate continuing campaign of attacks on American financial institutions that began last September and has since taken dozens of American banks intermittently offline, costing millions of dollars. But that attack was a less sophisticated “denial of service” effort.

Jeff Moss, chief security officer at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the private body that oversees the basic design of the Internet, said: “For the last year, Iran has been focused on disrupting financial institutions’ Web sites. If they are going after energy, and opening a multiprong front, at what point does it cross from annoyance to a threshold?”

Bits: Google Buys a Quantum Computer

Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times A quantum computer developed by D-Wave Systems.

Google and a corporation associated with NASA are forming a laboratory to study artificial intelligence by means of computers that use the unusual properties of quantum physics. Their quantum computer, which performs complex calculations thousands of times faster than existing supercomputers, is expected to be in active use in the third quarter of this year.

The Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, as the entity is called, will focus on machine learning, which is the way computers take note of patterns of information to improve their outputs. Personalized Internet search and predictions of traffic congestion based on GPS data are examples of machine learning. The field is particularly important for things like facial or voice recognition, biological behavior, or the management of very large and complex systems.

“If we want to create effective environmental policies, we need better models of what’s happening to our climate,” Google said in a blog post announcing the partnership. “Classical computers aren’t well suited to these types of creative problems.”

Google said it had already devised machine-learning algorithms that work inside the quantum computer, which is made by D-Wave Systems of Burnaby, British Columbia. One could quickly recognize information, saving power on mobile devices, while another was successful at sorting out bad or mislabeled data. The most effective methods for using quantum computation, Google said, involved combining the advanced machines with its clouds of traditional computers.

Google bought the machine in cooperation with the Universities Space Research Association, a nonprofit research corporation that works with NASA and others to advance space science and technology. Outside researchers will be invited to the lab as well.

This year D-Wave sold its first commercial quantum computer to Lockheed Martin. Lockheed officials said the computer would be used for the test and measurement of things like jet aircraft designs, or the reliability of satellite systems.

The D-Wave computer works by framing complex problems in terms of optimal outcomes. The classic example of this type of problem is figuring out the most efficient way a traveling salesman can visit 10 customers, but real-world problems now include hundreds of such variables and contingencies. D-Wave’s machine frames the problem in terms of energy states, and uses quantum physics to rapidly determine an outcome that satisfies the variables with the least use of energy.

In tests last September, an independent researcher found that for some types of problems the quantum computer was 3,600 times faster than traditional supercomputers. According to a D-Wave official, the machine performed even better in Google’s tests, which involved 500 variables with different constraints.

“The tougher, more complex ones had better performance,” said Colin Williams, D-Wave’s director of business development. “For most problems, it was 11,000 times faster, but in the more difficult 50 percent, it was 33,000 times faster. In the top 25 percent, it was 50,000 times faster.” Google declined to comment, aside from the blog post.

The machine Google will use at NASA’s Ames Research facility, located near Google headquarters, makes use of the interactions of 512 quantum bits, or qubits, to determine optimization. They plan to upgrade the machine to 2,048 qubits when this becomes available, probably within the next year or two. That machine could be exponentially more powerful.

Google did not say how it might deploy a quantum computer into its existing global network of computer-intensive data centers, which are among the world’s largest. D-Wave, however, intends eventually for its quantum machine to hook into cloud computing systems, doing the exceptionally hard problems that can then be finished off by regular servers.

Potential applications include finance, health care, and national security, said Vern Brownell, D-Wave’s chief executive. “The long-term vision is the quantum cloud, with a few high-end systems in the back end,” he said. “You could use it to train an algorithm that goes into a phone, or do lots of simulations for a financial institution.”

Mr. Brownell, who founded a computer server company, was also the chief technical officer at Goldman Sachs. Goldman is an investor in D-Wave, with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. Amazon Web Services is another global cloud, which rents data storage, computing, and applications to thousands of companies.

This month D-Wave established an American company, considered necessary for certain types of sales of national security technology to the United States government.

This post has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: May 17, 2013

An earlier version of this story stated that NASA was involved in the purchase of the quantum computer. While the computer will be located at NASA's facility, it was not involved in the purchase of the computer.

Bits Blog: A Quantum Computer Aces Its Test

Kim Stallknecht for The New York Times The processor of a quantum computer at D-Wave Systems’ lab in Burnaby, British Columbia.

The long-sought quantum computer, a machine potentially far ahead of today’s best supercomputers, is almost as hard to define as it is to build. For at least a few particular uses, however, the unusual computer made by D-Wave Systems now seems to be very fast indeed.

Next week a professor at Amherst College will present her findings about the performance of the D-Wave machine, which its makers say makes use of such unusual properties of quantum physics as a particle’s ability to move in one direction and its opposite at the same time.

The professor, Catherine C. McGeoch, who is the Beitzel professor in technology and society at Amherst, gave the machine a so-called optimization problem and compared the results with those generated by  popular software from I.B.M. running on a high-performance machine.

The D-Wave machine, she said, was 3,600 times as fast as the  conventional system.

“There is no sense in which this is the definitive statement about quantum computing,” Ms. McGeoch said. “I’m more interested in how well it works, not whether or not it is quantum.”

That question matters a great deal to some others in the field. While quantum properties are among the most tested and proven domains of physics, the concepts behind them — for example, suggestions that we live in one of many universes, or that objects not in direct contact can affect each other — make such properties hard to accept.

Harnessing them for the sake of computation, suggested as a possibility more than two decades ago, has proved difficult.

The optimization problem is typically something like how a traveling salesman would plan a complicated trip most effectively. Ms. McGeoch tested three problems involving optimization. In two of them, the D-Wave computer was slightly faster. In the third, it was markedly faster.

D-Wave, which was the subject of an article in The New York Times in March, has been criticized for making claims about its quantum capabilities that cannot be supported.

Over time, however, D-Wave’s performance has improved, and the skeptics have toned down their criticism. Nonetheless, D-Wave is sensitive about the issue and, even after selling a working machine to Lockheed Martin, eager to rebut the criticism.

Ms. McGeoch, who has spent more than 25 years testing computer speeds, performed the experiments while on sabbatical and was retained by D-Wave to run the tests.

D-Wave solves optimization problems by setting them in the context of energy consumption: the lowest power needed to achieve a stated outcome, which it says is quickly achieved through a quantum process, is the answer. D-Wave thinks that many problems in computing might be restated as optimization problems and that its machine could be coupled with cloud computing systems for particularly hard problems.

Ms. McGeoch said D-Wave’s chips had performed well and might have better outcomes in the future, as its machines become more powerful, and more complex optimization problems are set.

“There could be a tipping point,” she said. “If the problems get big enough, conventional systems break down. In theory, you could solve a large number of optimization problems. People don’t know how to do that conventionally without losing a lot of efficiency.”

Ex-Programmer Pleads Not Guilty in Long Island Computer Hacking Case

For years he commuted from his home in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island, to his job as a software programmer at Spellman High Voltage Electronics Corporation, a manufacturer of industrial power supplies in nearby Hauppage. His specialty was known as enterprise resource planning.

But after Mr. Meneses was passed over for promotions, he was upset enough to announce his resignation, giving two weeks’ notice. Before his final day in January 2012, colleagues caught him copying files from his computer to a flash drive, the authorities said. They cut off his access to company servers.

Soon odd things started happening. Employees at Spellman began reporting that they were unable to process routine transactions and were receiving error messages. An applicant for his old position received an e-mail from an anonymous address, warning him, “Don’t accept any position.” And the company’s business calendar was changed by a month, throwing production and finance operations into disorder.

That account was laid out by federal prosecutors on Thursday, who said that Mr. Meneses, using stolen passwords and his high-level knowledge of the computer system, had hacked Spellman’s servers and in three weeks caused enough mayhem to cost his former employer more than $90,000. “The defendant engaged in a 21st-century campaign of cyber-vandalism and high-tech revenge,” said Loretta E. Lynch, the United States attorney for the Eastern District. Mr. Meneses was arrested Thursday.

Investigators traced the e-mail account used to warn off the applicant for his old job to an Internet protocol address that belonged to Mr. Meneses’s new employer. They traced the changes to the company calendar to a hotel in Cary, N.C., a short distance from Mr. Meneses’s new job. Records from the hotel showed that he was staying there at the time of the online attack.

Mr. Meneses, 41, officially denied the allegations in Federal District Court in Central Islip on Thursday and was released on $50,000 bond. He faces up to 10 years in prison. A lawyer for Mr. Meneses, Tracey E. Gaffey, declined to comment.

Disruptions: Brain Computer Interfaces Inch Closer to Mainstream

Cadeau Creative Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband, can engage with computers, iPads and smartphones.

Last week, engineers sniffing around the programming code for Google Glass found hidden examples of ways that people might interact with the wearable computers without having to say a word. Among them, a user could nod to turn the glasses on or off. A single wink might tell the glasses to take a picture.

But don’t expect these gestures to be necessary for long. Soon, we might interact with our smartphones and computers simply by using our minds. In a couple of years, we could be turning on the lights at home just by thinking about it, or sending an e-mail from our smartphone without even pulling the device from our pocket. Farther into the future, your robot assistant will appear by your side with a glass of lemonade simply because it knows you are thirsty.

Researchers in Samsung’s Emerging Technology Lab are testing tablets that can be controlled by your brain, using a cap that resembles a ski hat studded with monitoring electrodes, the MIT Technology Review, the science and technology journal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported this month.

The technology, often called a brain computer interface, was conceived to enable people with paralysis and other disabilities to interact with computers or control robotic arms, all by simply thinking about such actions. Before long, these technologies could well be in consumer electronics, too.

Some crude brain-reading products already exist, letting people play easy games or move a mouse around a screen.

Emotive A brain computer interface, developed by Emotive.

NeuroSky, a company based in San Jose, Calif., recently released a Bluetooth-enabled headset that can monitor slight changes in brain waves and allow people to play concentration-based games on computers and smartphones. These include a zombie-chasing game, archery and a game where you dodge bullets — all these apps use your mind as the joystick. Another company, Emotiv, sells a headset that looks like a large alien hand and can read brain waves associated with thoughts, feelings and expressions. The device can be used to play Tetris-like games or search through Flickr photos by thinking about an emotion the person is feeling — like happy, or excited — rather than searching by keywords. Muse, a lightweight, wireless headband, can engage with an app that “exercises the brain” by forcing people to concentrate on aspects of a screen, almost like taking your mind to the gym.

Car manufacturers are exploring technologies packed into the back of the seat that detect when people fall asleep while driving and rattle the steering wheel to awaken them.

But the products commercially available today will soon look archaic. “The current brain technologies are like trying to listen to a conversation in a football stadium from a blimp,” said John Donoghue, a neuroscientist and director of the Brown Institute for Brain Science. “To really be able to understand what is going on with the brain today you need to surgically implant an array of sensors into the brain.” In other words, to gain access to the brain, for now you still need a chip in your head.

Last year, a project called BrainGate pioneered by Dr. Donoghue, enabled two people with full paralysis to use a robotic arm with a computer responding to their brain activity. One woman, who had not used her arms in 15 years, could grasp a bottle of coffee, serve herself a drink and then return the bottle to a table. All done by imagining the robotic arm’s movements.

But that chip inside the head could soon vanish as scientists say we are poised to gain a much greater understanding of the brain, and, in turn, technologies that empower brain computer interfaces. An initiative by the Obama administration this year called the Brain Activity Map project, a decade-long research project, aims to build a comprehensive map of the brain.

Miyoung Chun, a molecular biologist and vice president for science programs at the Kavli Foundation, is working on the project and although she said it would take a decade to completely map the brain, companies would be able to build new kinds of brain computer interface products within two years.

“The Brain Activity Map will give hardware companies a lot of new tools that will change how we use smartphones and tablets,” Dr. Chun said. “It will revolutionize everything from robotic implants and neural prosthetics, to remote controls, which could be history in the foreseeable future when you can change your television channel by thinking about it.”

There are some fears to be addressed. On the Muse Web site, an F.A.Q. is devoted to convincing customers that the device cannot siphon thoughts from people’s minds.

These brain-reading technologies have been the stuff of science fiction for decades.

In the 1982 movie “Firefox,” Clint Eastwood plays a fighter pilot on a mission to the Soviet Union to steal a prototype fighter jet that can be controlled by a brain neurolink. But Mr. Eastwood has to think in Russian for the plane to work, and he almost dies when he cannot get the missiles to fire during a dogfight. (Don’t worry, he survives.)

Although we won’t be flying planes with our minds anytime soon, surfing the Web on our smartphones might be closer.

Dr. Donoghue of Brown said one of the current techniques used to read people’s brains is called P300, in which a computer can determine which letter of the alphabet someone is thinking about based on the area of the brain that is activated when she sees a screen full of letters. But even when advances in brain-reading technologies speed up, there will be new challenges, as scientists will have to determine if the person wants to search the Web for something in particular, or if he is just thinking about a random topic.

“Just because I’m thinking about a steak medium-rare at a restaurant doesn’t mean I actually want that for dinner,” Dr. Donoghue said. “Just like Google glasses, which will have to know if you’re blinking because there is something in your eye or if you actually want to take a picture,” brain computer interfaces will need to know if you’re just thinking about that steak or really want to order it.

Kenneth I. Appel, Mathematician Who Harnessed Computer Power, Is Dead at 80

The cause was esophageal cancer, which was diagnosed in October, his son Andrew said.

Since the time of Euclid and Pythagoras, proofs of mathematical theorems had consisted of long strings of equations or geometric notations that any mathematician could read and quibble with, all marching logically, step by step, toward a conclusion. But the proof that Dr. Appel and a colleague, Wolfgang Haken, established in 1976 was of a different order.

Their conclusion, that four colors would suffice for any map, depended on 1,200 hours of computer time — the equivalent of 50 days — and 10 billion logical decisions all made automatically and out of sight by the innards of an I.B.M. computer at the University of Illinois in Urbana.

Hailed in some circles, including this newspaper, as “a major intellectual feat,” the proof shepherded computers toward a greater role in higher math. But it made many mathematicians uneasy; they worried about computer bugs and wondered how they could check or understand a “proof” they could not see. And it ignited a long-running debate about what constitutes a mathematical proof.

“Like a landmark Supreme Court case, the proof’s legacy is still felt and hotly debated,” said Edward Frenkel, a mathematician at the University of California, Berkeley.

Kevin Short, a mathematician at the University of New Hampshire, where Dr. Appel spent his later years, called the feat “a watershed for modern mathematics.”

“It has spawned whole fields of study,” he said.

Kenneth Ira Appel (pronounced ah-PEL) was born on Oct. 8, 1932, in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens, where he graduated from Queens College with a degree in mathematics in 1953. His father, Irwin, was an electrical engineer, and his mother, the former Lillian Sender, had been an office worker.

After a short stint as an actuary and two years in the Army, Kenneth Appel enrolled at the University of Michigan, where he earned a Ph.D. in math in 1959. During the summers, he programmed computers for Douglas Aircraft.

Dr. Appel soon went to work for the Institute for Defense Analyses in Princeton, N.J., doing research in cryptography and number theory for the federal government. He joined the University of Illinois as a professor in 1961. Long interested in Democratic politics, he also served a term on the Urbana City Council.

Some of the thorniest problems in math are simple to state but hideously complex under the surface. Such is the case with the four-color theorem, first enunciated by an English mapmaker, Francis Guthrie, in 1852. He asserted that to create a map in which no adjacent countries are the same color, only four colors are needed. Although everyone believed it was true, proof had eluded a century of mathematicians until Dr. Appel attended a lecture in 1972 by Dr. Haken.

Because of the bewildering variety of map configurations, Dr. Haken was contemplating using computers to solve the problem, but as he related in his lecture that evening, experts had convinced him that it was not possible.

Dr. Appel, familiar with computers from his defense and government work, was more optimistic.

“I don’t know of anything involving computers that can’t be done; some things just take longer than others,” he said to Dr. Haken afterward, according to an account in the journal Social Studies of Science by Donald MacKenzie of the University of Edinburgh. “Why don’t we take a shot at it?”

The two started off by showing that the universe of all possible maps must contain what mathematicians call an “unavoidable set” of 1,936 different configurations. One configuration might be a country surrounded by four neighbors, for example.

Their task, then, was to prove that each of these configurations could be rendered on a map using only four colors in such a way that no two adjacent land areas were of the same color. That was where the heaviest computation would come in. To help, they recruited a computer science graduate student, John Koch, and Dr. Appel persuaded the university to let them use its I.B.M. 370-168 computer, newly acquired for administrative services.

Those were the days when computers filled an entire room, although their memory capacities were minuscule compared with a modern smartphone. Dr. Short recounted an occasion, as described by Dr. Appel, when the computer gave an unexpected answer.

“Oh, that wire must have fallen out again,” Dr. Appel said.

Dr. Appel began to think of the computer as a partner, though with a different kind of brain, with almost “an artificial intelligence,” he told Dr. MacKenzie.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 30, 2013

An obituary on Monday about the mathematician Kenneth I. Appel contained several errors. The author of an article in the journal Social Studies of Science that discussed Dr. Appel’s work was Donald MacKenzie, not Douglas MacKenzie. The agency in Princeton, N.J., for which Dr. Appel worked is the Institute for Defense Analyses, not Analysis. And Dr. Appel’s wife is Carole S. Appel, not Carole S. Stein. (Stein was her surname before she married, but she took her husband’s name.)

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Logging Out of Gmail From Another Computer

I check my personal Gmail on the Web at work and sometimes forget to sign out of my account before I leave for the day. Is there a way to see if I left it on back at the office?

Gmail includes a feature that shows all your account activity on different computers and devices. Better yet, you can also use this tool to remotely sign out of any Gmail sessions on other computers and keep your account more secure.

To see your account activity, sign into Gmail on the Web from your home computer and scroll down to the bottom of the page. On the right side, you should see a line that says “Last account activity” and lists the most recent time mail was checked on your account, along with a Details link.

Click the Details link to open a page listing all your account activity on different computers and mobile devices, including the Internet addresses used and the times the account activity occurred. If you see other locations where your Gmail account is active, click the “Sign out of all other sessions” button to log out everywhere else.

Google introduced this ability to remotely sign out of your Gmail account a few years ago. For more information, check out the original post about the feature on the Gmail blog.

Bits Blog: Obama Discusses Computer Security With Corporate Chiefs

WASHINGTON – President Obama met with an invited group of 13 chief executives at the White House on Wednesday to discuss growing concerns about cybersecurity and enlist them to get behind his proposed legislation to combat the threat of computer warfare and corporate espionage.

Among those present were Rex W. Tillerson of Exxon Mobil, Randall L. Stephenson of AT&T, Wesley G. Bush of Northrop Grumman, Brian T. Moynihan of Bank of America, and Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, which had been attacked by foreign hackers as recently as Tuesday.

White House officials said the meeting in the White House Situation Room was intended as a “two way” information exchange. Aides said Mr. Obama wanted to hear directly from industry leaders about how vulnerable their companies were to computer attacks. The president also wanted to discuss efforts the government was taking to address threats.

“He has seen as various corporations and business leaders have gone public with their concerns about cybersecurity and the effects of breaches of cybersecurity on their operations,” said Jay Carney, the White House press secretary.

In recent weeks, Apple, Twitter, Facebook, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times have all stepped forward to say that their computer systems had been attacked. And since September, online banking sites of several American banks have been intermittently pulled offline by attacks that officials say originated in Iran.

But the president is also looking to drum up public support as he makes a renewed push for legislation that would give the administration new technological tools and broader authority in the battle against computer attacks by foreign governments. The president’s previous bill was killed by a Republican filibuster last year after intensive lobbying by the United States Chamber of Commerce and other business groups, which argued that the legislation would prove onerous.

“He also wants to convey to them how seriously he takes this issue and what he believes the right steps are moving forward,” Mr. Carney said. “And he certainly hopes that out of this meeting and the many others he has on this topic, that we will build the kind of consensus necessary to compel Congress to take appropriate action.”

The meeting Wednesday, which also included chief executives from American Electric Power, Xerox, Marathon Oil, Honeywell, United Parcel Service, ITT Exelis, Siemens and Frontier Communications, was just the latest step in the administration’s campaign to persuade Congress to pass a computer security bill.

In recent months, several senior administration officials — including Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security; Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation; and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff — have provided closed-door briefings to members of Congress about the threat.

As a stopgap measure, the president signed an executive order last month that promotes increased the sharing of information between the government and private companies.

The president has also been making his case directly to the public in speeches and media appearances in recent months. In his State of the Union speech, Mr. Obama spent more time on the topic of computer attacks than he did on North Korea and Iran combined.

In an interview on ABC News broadcast on Wednesday, Mr. Obama was careful to avoid saying that the United States is engaged in a computer war with China. He said officials need to “be careful with war analogies” in discussions about the topics.

But the president said that billions of dollars are lost when industrial secrets were stolen online. And he said that some of the attacks on the nation’s private and public computer networks were sponsored by foreign governments.

“Our companies are put into competitive disadvantage. You know, there are disruptions to our systems that, you know, involve everything from our financial systems to some of our infrastructure,” Mr. Obama said. “And this is why I’ve taken some very aggressive executive actions. But we need Congress to act.”

He said that the government was limited in what it could do to confront China and other sponsors of computer attacks. And he said the government needed the authority to require that critical infrastructure in the country is hardened against such attacks.

“There are ways that we can harden our critical infrastructure, our financial sector,” Mr. Obama said. “And the only thing that’s holding us back from doing that right now is we haven’t gotten the legislative authority out of Congress. They need to get this done.”

Special Report: The Female Factor: Computer Coding: It's Not Just for Boys

But when she told her best friend — “he’s male, also into programming” — his response was not what she had expected. “He was like, ‘Wait, how do you know about them? You’re a girl and you shouldn’t be doing that,”’ Ms. Aleksander said incredulously.

She and her friend Honey Ross, 15, are among the few girls at King Alfred School, their private school in North London, with an intense interest in technology. The two, confident and outgoing, say they understand why: computing can seem boring from the outside, populated mainly by nerdy boys.

“It’s sad,” Ms. Ross said, chatting between classes in the computer lab. “It’s such an amazing world. It’s kind of waiting for loads of young girls” to jump in.

Belinda Parmar would love to see that happen, particularly since current statistics suggest that women in technology, already a relative rarity, are about to get even scarcer.

Three years ago, Ms. Parmar founded Lady Geek, a consulting firm that helps technology companies connect with female customers and bolster the number of women in work forces. Convinced that the paucity of women in technology has its roots in earlier life, Ms. Parmar last fall started Little Miss Geek, a non-profit aimed at convincing girls that programming is not a solitary grind but creative and eventually lucrative work.

Both sexes love gadgets — but while girls may enjoy owning the latest devices, parents and teachers do not point out that they also have the brains to build them, Ms. Parmar says.

“They’re dreaming of using the iPad mini and the latest smartphone, but they’re not dreaming of creating it,” she said.

As a consequence, Ms. Parmar said, women are missing out in an industry that is changing the world and growing and paying handsomely, as other sectors shrink.

Britain’s technology sector is 20 percent female, according to Eurostat, the E.U. statistics agency; Ms. Parmar cites a figure of 17 percent. Neither is far off the E.U. average of 21.8 percent, or the U.S. rate of 24 percent of technology jobs held by women, down from 36 percent in 1991, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology, at the University of Colorado in Boulder.

The future looks bleak. Girls take just 8 percent of Britain’s computer science A-levels, the high school exam that is the passport to university studies, Little Miss Geek reports. In the United States, girls are 19 percent of high school Advanced Placement test-takers in the field, the Colorado center says.

Ms. Parmar traces the problem at least partly to technology’s image. When her team asked children to draw a person who worked in technology, all sketched men, often geeky and disheveled.

That brainy-guys-in-the-garage stereotype is hardly helped by companies that Ms. Parmar believes condescend to female customers with pink devices, and offend them with bikini-clad models at technology shows. “The technology industry is 30 years behind the car industry” in interaction with women, she said.

If they do enroll in computer classes, pre-adolescent and teenage girls often find they are the only girls in the room.

“Even girls that are doing well at math, they opt out. They just want to belong,” said Marina Larios, president of the European Association for Women in Science, Engineering & Technology.

Messages about gender and technology tend to start in earliest childhood, when boys are encouraged to play computer games and think about how things work, while girls get toy makeup and fashion sets, Ms. Parmar said.

Catherine Ashcraft, senior research scientist at the Colorado center, said:

“It appears on the surface that women aren’t choosing” technology, but “there are a lot of factors that are influencing that choice.” She continued: “Girls talk about how even when there’s a computer in the house, they don’t get access to it as much, because the boys are pushing them away.”

Subtle, even unconscious bias can prompt parents, teachers and guidance counselors to give the sexes different study and career advice, she said.

Japan’s Space Agency Says Rocket Information Was Stolen by Computer Virus

Poorly paid police officers often live cheek by jowl with criminals. When violence erupts, low-level officers are easy targets.

Catching up with one of the founders of Twitter — a new dad who no longer follows anybody on Twitter.

Profiles in Science Peter G. Neumann: Rethinking the Computer at 80

One of those is Peter G. Neumann, now an 80-year-old computer scientist at SRI International, a pioneering engineering research laboratory here.

As an applied-mathematics student at Harvard, Dr. Neumann had a two-hour breakfast with Einstein on Nov. 8, 1952. What the young math student took away was a deeply held philosophy of design that has remained with him for six decades and has been his governing principle of computing and computer security.

For many of those years, Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man) has remained a voice in the wilderness, tirelessly pointing out that the computer industry has a penchant for repeating the mistakes of the past. He has long been one of the nation’s leading specialists in computer security, and early on he predicted that the security flaws that have accompanied the pell-mell explosion of the computer and Internet industries would have disastrous consequences.

“His biggest contribution is to stress the ‘systems’ nature of the security and reliability problems,” said Steven M. Bellovin, chief technology officer of the Federal Trade Commission. “That is, trouble occurs not because of one failure, but because of the way many different pieces interact.”

Dr. Bellovin said that it was Dr. Neumann who originally gave him the insight that “complex systems break in complex ways” — that the increasing complexity of modern hardware and software has made it virtually impossible to identify the flaws and vulnerabilities in computer systems and ensure that they are secure and trustworthy.

The consequence has come to pass in the form of an epidemic of computer malware and rising concerns about cyberwarfare as a threat to global security, voiced alarmingly this month by the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, who warned of a possible “cyber-Pearl Harbor” attack on the United States.

It is remarkable, then, that years after most of his contemporaries have retired, Dr. Neumann is still at it and has seized the opportunity to start over and redesign computers and software from a “clean slate.”

He is leading a team of researchers in an effort to completely rethink how to make computers and networks secure, in a five-year project financed by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, with Robert N. Watson, a computer security researcher at Cambridge University’s Computer Laboratory.

“I’ve been tilting at the same windmills for basically 40 years,” said Dr. Neumann recently during a lunchtime interview at a Chinese restaurant near his art-filled home in Palo Alto, Calif. “And I get the impression that most of the folks who are responsible don’t want to hear about complexity. They are interested in quick and dirty solutions.”

An Early Voice for Security

Dr. Neumann, who left Bell Labs and moved to California as a single father with three young children in 1970, has occupied the same office at SRI for four decades. Until the building was recently modified to make it earthquake-resistant, the office had attained notoriety for the towering stacks of computer science literature that filled every cranny. Legend has it that colleagues who visited the office after the 1989 earthquake were stunned to discover that while other offices were in disarray from the 7.1-magnitude quake, nothing in Dr. Neumann’s office appeared to have been disturbed.

A trim and agile man, with piercing eyes and a salt-and-pepper beard, Dr. Neumann has practiced tai chi for decades. But his passion, besides computer security, is music. He plays a variety of instruments, including bassoon, French horn, trombone and piano, and is active in a variety of musical groups. At computer security conferences it has become a tradition for Dr. Neumann to lead his colleagues in song, playing tunes from Gilbert and Sullivan and Tom Lehrer.

Until recently, security was a backwater in the world of computing. Today it is a multibillion-dollar industry, though one of dubious competence, and safeguarding the nation’s computerized critical infrastructure has taken on added urgency. President Obama cited it in the third debate of the presidential campaign, focusing on foreign policy, as something “we need to be thinking about” as part of the nation’s military strategy.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 31, 2012

An earlier version of this article misstated the name of the organization whose Risks Forum newsgroup is edited by Peter G. Neumann. It is the Association for Computing Machinery, not the Association of Computing Machinery.

National Briefing | South: South Carolina: State Computer System Is Hacked

The Republican budget plan would kill research that leads to new jobs.

Room for Debate asks: Does the prevalence of racy Halloween costumes mask our fears of death and dying?

High & Low Finance: A Computer Lesson From 1987, Still Unlearned by Wall Street

On one day, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 23 percent of its value. People wondered if that heralded a new Depression. A front page headline in The New York Times asked, “Does 1987 Equal 1929?”

It did not. The next recession, a mild one, was more than two years away.

What it did signify was the beginning of the destruction of markets by dumb computers. Or, to be fair to the computers, by computers programmed by fallible people and trusted by people who did not understand the computer programs’ limitations. As computers came in, human judgment went out.

That process, then in its infancy, gained speed over the next two decades. By 2008, it really did threaten a new Depression. But we’ll get to that later.

The 1987 villain was something called portfolio insurance. It was a product that used stock index futures and options to assure institutional investors that they need not worry if market prices seemed to be unreasonably high.

Portfolio insurance would let them get out with minimal damage if markets ever began to fall. They would simply sell ever-increasing numbers of futures contracts, a process known as dynamic hedging.

The short position in futures contracts would then offset the losses caused by falls in the stocks they owned.

Portfolio insurance did not start the widespread selling of stocks in 1987. But it made sure that the process got out of hand. As computers dictated that more and more futures be sold, the buyers of those futures not only insisted on sharply lower prices but also hedged their positions by selling the underlying stocks. That drove prices down further, and produced more sell orders from the computers. At the time, many people generally understood how portfolio insurance worked, but there was a belief that its very nature would assure that it could not cause panic. Everyone would know the selling was not coming from anyone with inside information, so others would be willing to step in and buy to take advantage of bargains. Or so it was believed.

But when the crash arrived, few understood much of anything, except that it was like nothing they had ever seen. Anyone who did step in with a buy order quickly regretted the decision.

I was then the stock market columnist at Barron’s and I spent most of that October week on the trading floor at Salomon Brothers, then a leading brokerage firm in stock trading. Near the end of that Monday, I remember looking up and seeing dozens of young investment bankers lining the trading floor. There was really nothing for them to see; the ticker tape rolling across the side wall was hours behind actual trading. But many no doubt wondered if their world was coming to an end.

Stan Shopkorn, the Salomon vice chairman and chief equity trader — and a man who had not had a great day — noticed them soon after I did, and loudly suggested they must have something better to do. They didn’t, but they quickly left.

The next day, a Tuesday, the Wall Street establishment effectively came together to stem the panic, although what happened gained little attention at the time. As sell orders forced the New York Stock Exchange to halt trading in stock after stock, word came that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange was threatening to halt trading in stock index futures. With many stocks not trading, there was no way to calculate an accurate value of a stock index. The system threatened to grind to a panic-induced halt.

It was then that Mr. Shopkorn got on the phone with Bob Mnuchin, the head stock trader at Goldman Sachs, and Salomon’s principal competitor. I don’t know who initiated the call, but I heard the result. They agreed to tell their floor traders to tell the stock exchange specialists that Goldman and Salomon would submit buy orders to reopen any stock in the Standard & Poor’s 500. Within minutes, prices began to recover.