Artificial Memory and Computer-Aided Intelligence

I am currently taking a class in Problem Solving and Creativity. We did a session on estimating on Monday night. At first, Professor Saaty was irritated with the class because we couldn't do things like calculate the amount of energy the earth receives from the sun, like it is something we do everyday, similar to tying our shoes! After a few minutes, I pulled out my laptop to access my Computer-Aided Intelligence. This greatly improved the situation. The internet has become the Oracle. It has answers to the most amazingly diverse and indepth questions such as:

1- What fraction of the energy of the sun is received by the earth?
2- How many people can you feed from an acre? The U.S. has 343 million acres (divide by 2.47 to get hectares) of arable land. How many people can it sustain?
3- Estimate the number of people that can comfortably survive on this earth.
4- What is the total volume of all people’s body on earth?
5- How high would the seas rise if the Antarctic polar ice cap of 5 million square miles area by two miles high melts?
6- Estimate the amount of oil the U.S. consumes per day. It is 1/5 the world total (85 million Barrels).
7- Estimate the number of bricks that cover Joncaire Street and validate your estimate with data. Go gather the data. How many pickup trucks can carry that many brick?
8- Estimate the number of people in the U.S who are between the ages of 20 and 40.
9- Estimate in tons the amount of food the U.S. population consumes in one year.
10- Estimate how many egg laying chickens there are in the United States.
11- Estimate the annual budget of the University of Pittsburgh.
12- Estimate how long you are going to live using heredity, exercise and diet and how hard you strain yourself.
13- How many people die in the world each day?
14. How many squares of toilet paper does the average American use in a year?
15- How many Wall-mart stores are there in the world?

Seriously! Without help from multiple books and experts, who could ever figure these things out quickly. With the clack of a few keys, I had my answers. Now that's amazing!

The internet can be this helpful in medical situations. Of course, self-diagnosis is tricky and complicated conditions and diseases may take some real concentrated study to understand. However, we truly have the world at our fingertips.