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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 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.
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 . . .
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.
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"!