There are many artificial intelligence (AI) software which do that on grids of computers, but that would not be nearly as intelligent as a grid of Human minds interfaced to the system similar to how
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoldIt turned protein-folding into a game and some people outperform the computers.
A normal Human brain has 10^15 connections between neurons. A normal computer runs 10^9 cycles per second and runs much dumber software than Human intelligence, so even if it was fast enough to run a Human brain as software, that software doesn't exist. If we went to third-world countries and hired everyone who is starving or lacking other basic needs of life, we could create a billion jobs which produce far more value than they would have to be paid.
That value could be used in predicting stock markets, patterns of global events, or anything else AI is already set up to predict. This could potentially obsolete all existing infrastructure used to predict those things and turn it into a free market where people in the system hire eachother recursively to help them predict various patterns in the system.
The realtime part of the service would be useful for adding Human intuition and strategic intelligence to Internet games. Non-player-characters acting in a predictable and boring way? Throw in a few bits per second of real Human intelligence from this cloud, charged at a free market fluctuating price per bit, normalized against actual accuracy of such predictions and assembling of patterns.
Think of the artistic uses of real Human intuition and intelligence sold by the bit at fluctuating market prices, accessed through standard AI software interfaces. Evolve code that uses recursions and fractals and other math and logic to paint great works of art, compose music using evolved code (like in my Audivolv software which evolves Java code to define wave amplitudes calculated 44100 times per second for 44.1 khz audio quality) and Human minds together, and things we can't even imagine yet, accessed seamlessly as if the people are just another function in the software. On the other end, the people solving these puzzles of flowing patterns are having fun playing the game which automatically adjusts to the difficulty level where they most efficiently earn cryptocurrency. Research into questions of consciousness. Can a hybrid software made of AI and real Human intuition (indirectly through the game networking our minds together statistically) experience the same consciousness of the person alone, or of 5 people who are trying to sync their actions in the game so that any 4 of them can reproduce most of the actions of the missing 1, for any 1 of the 5 that temporarily leaves? If a hand is only a machine thats connected through bio nerve wires to our brain, and we feel like we are our hands, then would we also feel like we are the software and other people in this system which our thoughts about the game flow with? Can consciousness flow through an Internet wire the same as it flows through simple well understood bio nerves between our brain and our hands? Are brains, sufficiently networked together at a subconscious pscyhology level, still completely individuals? If you learn to imagine recursive actions into chains of people in this system which happen as fast as any other network call into the Internet, as people play the game in realtime like any other game but more flexible and flowing, then where is the line between the consciousness of the second and third step in that recursion, the second and third people it jumps through in the patterns flowing through the system? My answer is consciousness is like and ocean and we are all drops of water, statistically localized in bodies, a problem easily solved by the intelligent and smooth and intuitive dance-like flowing of our actions and movements in this game. Identity is ok as an approximation, but when you look deeper into it, the contradictions in that theory build up and we should instead find a different way to divide reality. There are many things this Internet cryptocurrency prediction service could be used for, some very practical and others just barely imaginable.
If I flip 2 coins and a least 1 landed heads, whats the chance both landed heads? Most people say 1/2 or 1/4, but there are 4 ways 2 coins can land, I only excluded "tails tails", leaving "heads heads", "tails heads", and "heads tails", and then I asked what is the chance of "heads heads", so its 1/3. That is a simple bayesian statistical question, and most people get it wrong because it goes against how brains naturally think. For that reason, the metacortex which networks our minds together should be some kind of bayesian statistics. It should also react gradually in realtime to flow with our thoughts.
I created
http://sourceforge.net/projects/bayesiancortex to network our minds together, but its still an early version. Its what led to this theory of a new kind of economy for prediction based on a grid of Human minds.
A paint program where the canvas is the visual cortex of a simple kind of artificial intelligence. You paint with the mouse into its dreams and it responds by changing what you painted gradually. There will also be an API for using it with other programs as a general high-dimensional space. Each pixel's brightness is its own dimension. Bayesian nodes have exactly 3 childs because that is all thats needed to do NAND in a fuzzy way as Bayes' Rule which is NAND at certain extremes. NAND can be used to create any logical system. In this early version, I'm still working on edge detection and its understanding of the same shapes at different brightnesses. This will be a module of the bigger Human AI Net project and will be used for adding realtime intuitive high dimensional intelligence in audio and visual interactions with the user.
The big players have their own cloud computing infrastructures, but this is more like a very weak form of Borg Collective, without the medical implants or mind control, just a job of playing a flowing puzzle game where you earn cryptocurrency by moving your mouse, thinking into a mind reading game controller (like Emotiv Epoc or OpenEEG), or other user-interfaces, toward higher accuracy of predicting and putting together the patterns.
Think about what the creation of stock markets did for global productivity. This would be that level of improvement over stock markets as they exist today. You could even run statistical software on it. Want to simulate a Human brain? What better platform to run it on than a hive of Human minds through a statistical interface? Or find patterns in SETI's data from space. People are natural pattern matchers as
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FoldIt proved.
Just a proposal for a project. I have more ideas than time to pursue them all, but I am building the part that networks our minds together for free. We could use some simple cryptocurrency as a plugin, but as I explain here, I have other important things to do, one of which is this system to network our minds together...
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=77332.0 If I do that part, will some of you add the cryptocurrency? You're the experts.