Slashdot Mirror
Self-Assembling Nanocomputers
A Semi-Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article a researcher at Harvard University has developed techniques for self assembly of nanoscale wires that operate without resistance due to a property called ballistic conductivity. He hopes the research will provide an 'end run' around convential top-down circuit designs, allowing much smaller, faster and more energy efficient computers."
Resistance, being futile, is not responsible for the light-speed limit for electron flow. That's Einstein's fault. However, if the circuit is considerably smaller than current designs, then all the electrical pathways get drastically shortened and processing gets faster anyway...
Excuse me, I just had an image of a 55-gallon drum of these things sitting by my computer, quietly self-replicating into a Beowulf cluster of a billion-odd submicroscopic quantum computers. It could solve every computational problem currently on the books in the blink of an aibo, render all cryptography (except OTP) useless, and probably faithfully emulate the intelligence of several myriad Ph.D.'s long enough to invent a higher consciousness for itself, becoming an unimaginably transcendent cerebral being to which humans would seem as advanced as bacteria.
And think of the Quake framerates!