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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."
...a bright orange solution of a billion billion molecules.
In other news, astronauts have discovered a new use for tang.
Great minds reading /. who are interested in this article should definitely make their way to Pasadena this summer for the Computing Beyond Silicon Summer School. The dateline for applying has passed, but you can always gatecrash, or monitor the site to read the lecture notes online (they better be available).
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
"The ENIAC was a 4-bit computer that ran at a now-paltry 20,000 cycles per second--about the computing power found in an electronic greeting card that plays a silly song when opened."
Man, how far have we progressed? How far do we have to go? This is some cool stuff, wonder how long before I'll be able to walk down the street and tap the street sign to get directions, locate restaurants, etc.....hmmm...come to think of it....
I am applying for a patent on this new found technology. I'll call it National Universities Technology Streetside Assistance Center, or NUTSAC for short.
Yes, soon I will take over the world, one stretch of dirty litter-ridden pavement at a time!!!! MUWHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
Sent from your iPad.
I thought that this might be interesting for a few of those who don't know much about quantum computing.
The idea is to have a bit that can be a 1 or 0 at the same time. This means that with 50 bits, called qubits, you can represent every number from 1 to 1 trillion, at the same time.
What's really cool, is with this you can use what's called a bogo sort. Imagine a set of cards, that is shuffled. Now to sort them in order, most people would go through 1 by 1 and put some in front and some in back. A bogo sort creates a new universe and then throws the cards into the air. If they land in order, great, else destroy the universe.
All these universes are created at the same time, making it 1 step to sort 52 cards. Like I said, it's interesting.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
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.
There have been many mention of "future computers" involving "DNA" or "Molecular Structures" and so on.
Well
Aren't we made up of "molecules" ?
Don't we have "DNA" ?
Methinks the REAL future computer be the DRASTICALLY ALTERED HUMAN BEINGS (if they can still be called "humans") with their molecular structures perfectly alligned to carry out not only bodily functions but also for computational needs, their DNAs become ultra-computational devices
Yep, that may be scifi like, but who knows ?
Instead of the computer being out of body (wearable, or whatever), the future computers will be THE BODY WE HAVE - don't need to wear anything or carry any batteries.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
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?
Up and coming silicon replacements? But they've been around for decades!
I thought saline was the newest thing? But hey, if they can get 'em to run quake, I'm all for it. Oh the wonders of technology! . . . Maybe I missed the point . . .
Here is a paper I had to write on the subject; it is in draft form as the class did not call for a final version.
Quantum Computing
I know, I posted this in my thread too. Oh well, I have karma to burn. Besides, I feel this is important enough to bring it to the top.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
Not really that much of a spread of technologies, mostly just small-scale molecular/DNA computing and quantum computing. If you ask me the real front runners for next gen computing are RSFQ, spintronics, and massively parallel "quasi-processors" / reconfigurable computers (such as RAW and "smart memory"). More the kind of thing you'll see on your desktop 5-10 years from now rather than in the lab and still needing another decade to fully develop.
Who is going to write the software for these little beasties? I mean, how many of us are currently even a quarter tapping the potential of the machine on our desktop? (Yes, I know some are - generally those doing massive calculations. I'm talking about the typical user.)
The most pressing limitation of current computing to my mind is the software we have available. Either it has bugs in it, or it doesn't quite allow us to do what we want, or the user interface is klunky and non-intuitive.
Ideally, we'd like computers to work out what we are really trying to do. There are some tasks that can be described in just a few words of English, yet to write a script that current computers could understand would be a significant undertaking.
I remember being impressed the first time I used MacDraw and found that if I duplicate a shape, drag it to a new position and duplicate it again, the next shape automatically appears in an analogous position. But this is just one tiny little example of a program being a bit intuitive and helpful. There are millions of other things programs could do like this, but so few are actually implemented.
Advances in computer hardware make it more possible to run complex AI algorithms in a short time, but someone has still got to write those algorithms. I think currently there is a bigger gap between the software we want and the software we have than there is between the hardware we want and the hardware we have.
One problem with all of this is separating fact from hype when it comes to nanotechnology.
The money may come in, but the market has to correct sometime.
I predict a "nanotechnology" version of the web economy bullshit generator in the not-so-near future!
Dot-con business plans were hard enough to understand; I can only imagine how bad these nanotech ones are read...
Interesting; thanks for sharing. I see you credited qubit.com. That's a great resource.
Any other books you'd recommend on the subject?
The thiol-based systems are the same ones from Bell Labs that are being questioned as based on potentially fraudulent data.
I would like to thank the webmasters at popsci.com for such a well done site.
I'm so tired of those "old school" web pages that use a readable font like the default 10pt Times. I love it so much when I get the opportunity to read an article in a miniscule 6 point sans serif font in a narrow column that takes up about a fifth of the width of the screen. I'm tired of all these websites that actually flow text to the size of the window I've chosen. It's so refreshing to have all that nice white space.
And I hate those sites that actually put the related content on one page. It's time more webmasters realize how much I appricate having an article arbitrarily spilt into seven different pages. And its so nice of them to save the screen space taken up by those pesky "Next Page" buttons. I really enjoy clicking on those tiny page numbers to flip pages. I thought for a minute that they'd made a mistake and that red rectangle image with the ">" symbol was the page flipper, but after clicking it about ten times it's apparent it doesn't do anything. Phew, that was close.
It's a good thing it was split up to many pages, I was really looking forward to seeing that insightful poll question "Will the Segway change transportation? Yes/No/Maybe." I thought I'd only get to see it once, but instead it was on each page, in case I missed it the first six times. Well done!
Now, usually most webmasters go soft and have a "print this" link that shows the entire article text in the default font, wrapped to the screen size. popsci does includes this link, but they get it! They realize that should I wish to print an article, I don't want to print the whole thing at once. Rather, I enjoy clicking the "print this" link on each page and sending off a different print job for each page. After all, why should my printer driver decide where to break up page boundaries? Is that really its job? Why would I possibly want to have all the article text in one place?
Finally, a webmaster that "gets it"!
In 1994, Leonard Adleman (the A in RSA) showed that it was possible to solve a particular computational problem using standard molecular biology techniques. His experiment solved an instance of the Directed Hamiltonian Path Problem (also called the Travelling Salesman problem) entirely by manipulating strands of DNA. The problem he solved was only 7 nodes in length, which is easily computable by hand in about 20 minutes, but was a great achievment in molecular computing.
There are two compelling advantages to using molecular biology to solve computational problems. Firstly, DNA has a much greater information density than almost any other media: using DNA it is possible to store data in a trillion times less space than with an electronic computer. Presently, it is possible to contain 10^21 DNA molecules in less than 1 litre of water, (with each molecule encoding potentially 400 bits of information).
Secondly, biological operations performed on DNA are massively parallel. All operations that are executed are performed on each strand of DNA simultaneously.
Adleman's experiment encoded a 7 node Hamiltonian Path Problem. Each node of the graph was encoded as a random 20 base long strand of DNA, and these were randomly annealed into long potential 'paths' through the graph. Paths were selected (and extracted) based on the length of the strand, which nodes were encoded in the strand, and whether the path encoded all nodes. At the end of this selection process, the remaining strand/s should encode the shortest path of the graph.
As can be imagined, this experiment has potentially huge consequences for large computational problems.
The problem remains to make this process reliable.
David Jackson
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Incorrigible punster - Do not incorrige.
You drink a hell of a lot of coffee.
I have to reboot every 16 hours or so.
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It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Ever since I read the prediction from an ol popular science "Computers of the future may only wiegh 2 tons."
Somehow I don't think we can begin to comprehend what we will see in the future. Try telling somone from 1995 that in 5 years he would be able to buy a 30 gig harddrive for $100 and in 7 years 80 gig HDs would ship in computers. Try telling someone from 1990 that in 10 years computers would run standard at 1 ghz. Or try telling someone from 1970 that in 30 years he would be able to hold a super-computer in his lap and it would wiegh about 5 pounds.
T Money
World Domination with a plastic spoon since 1984