14 DAY TRIAL // A group of ten MIT students and staff members have taken part today in an experiment meant to power a computer using non-conventional energy sources. The experiment took place in the lobby of MIT's Stata Clara computing campus and demonstrated that computers can be powered using stationary bicycles.
Five bikes had been hooked to special generators that transformed mechanical action into direct current energy. The produced energy was then directed to a converter that transformed that energy into alternating current that was used to power a couple of small SiCortex supercomputers, running fusion reaction simulations.
This was part of the Innovate or Die initiative, a project sponsored by search-engine giant Google and Canadian Specialized Bicycle Components company. The main purpose of this initiative is to research the "zero-emission inventions". Each participant has to shoot their project on video and post the film until Friday on Google's young son YouTube.
The winners will get a Specialized bike for each team member and a single check for $5,000. Ilana Brito, a graduate student in biology thinks that the idea itself is very cool. "Using bicycle power to do something novel and something that will hopefully lead to maybe solutions for alternative energy, something like that". That is where the first doubt occurs to me that this is really about MIT students. "Something like that" is far from the scientific explanation we got used to from MIT students.
Anyway, in my humble opinion, this was more of a showoff that of researching viable alternative solutions to fossil fuel. First of all, I don't think anybody would make a career out of pedaling all day long for the sake of cheap and clean energy - or at least, not until some kind of pedaling humans farms arise. Finally, I think that they should have considered using hamster-driven contraptions to fuel a password cracking server. It would have been more "human".