Essay submitted to Teilhard de Chardin Scholarship Essay Awards

Computer hardware development is accelerating at an unprecedented pace. Year by year we have faster and faster chips with interior design sophisticated and far-removed from the previous versions. Following on the heels of hardware development is software development. Computer programs, by definition, are instructions that the processor meticulously interprets and executes. But there exists a class of programs which does not fit into this definition. These programs “learn ” by trial and error in the course of execution, rectify themselves and in the end infer a bit more than what is provided in the original code. They belong to the up-coming field of ‘soft-computing’. Over and above, there is a trend to move from software into the realm of wetware (programs that more and more imitate the functioning of the human brain). My area of research is the application of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) branch of Qualitative Reasoning in solving complex problems in collaborative engineering. I am designing and implementing expert systems, i.e, computer systems that mimic the intuition and experience of experts in solving the problems at hand. What future d