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Future Computers
jethro200 writes "Popsci.com has an interesting story on the up-and-coming silicon replacements, ranging from DNA to a little molecule called thiol to using atoms in a quantum state. Obviously, these are a long way from being your next desktop, but an interesting article nonetheless."
We have this 3-5 pound computer sitting in our heads that is so powerful that we can't emulate it with any success. To boot, it doesn't use hardware like we normally think about it.
When the claim comes up that someday we will use biological computers, custom grown neurons that will do calculations for us and grow beyond our own puny brains, I can only nod my head in agreement. Our hardware can't be so difficult to figure out, we've got the raw components, we just need to know the schematics.
It's only a matter of time.
I have been pwned because my
I find it interesting that the problems that this new research is solving are changing along with the solutions.
Anything based on a more delicate technology like DNA (which is only stable over a narrow temperature range) would need some kind of homeostatic enclosure. Potential candidates are cheaply available.
That isn't a herd of cows, that's the Pentagon's decryption engine farm. And Bin Laden's successors are really going to have to worry about what the cockroaches might be up to, especially if Dolly the supercomputing sheep is better at processing operational intelligence than the FBI and the CIA - not, on the face of it, difficult.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
It seems like making nano FPGAs would be the easy way to go, but never having made one myself I wouldn't really know, would I? I have done a bit of research on the subject though and apparently there is skepticism of the current king of FPGA, Xilinx, has been criticized for using an inefficient and non-standard design in their FPGAs that would supposedly work better in a much simpler layout. Obviously simplicity of design could be helpful when dealing with nanoscale materials.
On a totally separate note, I thought the DNA experiment about the party guests was a bit suspicious. I've written GRE study guides in the past and so I've spent quite a bit of time analyzing those kinds of analytical questions. From a test writer's perspective, their experiment raises some interesting issues. The GRE frequently uses seven or more entities with special requirements in the analytical section and most of the questions can be solved with a piece of paper and pencil in a few minutes using simple logic. If that wasn't the case, then how would the test writer be sure what the correct answer is if they couldn't verify it?
So, if they've got all these special case situations with perhaps dozens of variables for each party goer then how do they know what the right answer is and that there are not more than one right answer --the bane of test writers. And if they do know how to accurately calculate this data, then is it really as complicated as they make it seem?