Aashrith Reddy Geetla, a sophomore at Mountain Ridge High School, and Shreyas Damera, a sophomore at Paradise Valley High School, presented their research, “Synthesizing Emergent Intelligence: A Bio-Inspired Computational Approach to Adaptive Learning Organisms,” at the Canyon Undergraduate Conference held at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix on March 31.
Their research explores the possibility of a “technological singularity,” when artificial intelligence crosses human intelligence.
“We hypothesize that after that event happens, there will be uncontrollable and accelerated growth, and humans will actually be the second most intelligent beings on the planet after that,” Geetla said.
Damera and Geetla began their research after discovering a statistic that replicating the human brain with current technology and computational power would require a city block of computers, powered by a nuclear reactor and cooled by a river.
“Your brain can do the same amount of computation using only 20 watts of power,” Geetla said. “We reverse-engineered the problem. And we saw, where did we go wrong? We started by thinking that all life began as single-celled organisms, right? And it evolved over millions of generations into the complex organisms we have today.”
He added that they wanted to mimic the process of evolution by creating single-celled organisms in a decentralized environment run by computers. “We wanted to see what evolution would bring, and if that could, over millions of years, turn into some sort of intelligent being.”
This research was conducted under the leadership of Professors Bill Hughes and Ryan Woodward of the software engineering department at GCU. Geetla and Damera contacted them via email and initially aimed to write a research paper after meeting the two professors last year while participating in GCU’s Research and Design Program.
“We just interned underneath them, and they acted as our mentors,” Geetla said. “We found out about this. Even high schoolers can present at this undergraduate conference. And we thought, why not?”
The students met at GCU each week to continue their research, making about an hour-long drive there and back. Although they worked on the project weekly while balancing high school coursework and extracurriculars, such as Geetla playing tennis, they did not receive any school credit.
“The main challenge we had was getting that computation power because, evolving all of these artificial learning organisms online was just way too expensive, and we didn’t have the funds,” Geetla explained.
They posted on LinkedIn, gaining attention and connecting with GCU alum Erik Yost, who is the program manager at MIT’s Quantum Photonics and AI group.
“He said we could intern under him, and they’re developing a quantum computer right now that’s almost open source. It’s not ready yet, but they said they’d give us access to the beta version so we can test our research on there,” Geetla said.
“So we just hope to create that same type of coding that we did, but create it in a quantum-based environment. So we’re gonna have to recode everything, make it quantum friendly make it able to run on a quantum computer, and then we’re just gonna have to test it.”
During their presentation on March 31, Geetla said he and Damera felt welcomed at the conference, especially with counselors from both of their schools being there. “After the first one or two presentations, we had a lot of professors come over as well…just talking with them, they just seemed genuinely curious about the topic. That’s when the nerves sort of kicked out and it was just like (a) conversation.”
Geetla is considering attending Arizona State University or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to further his education and plans to major in artificial intelligence. He aims to help develop quantum computers that are accessible to everyone.
