Slashdot Mirror
Molecular Photography
med dev writes "An article at New Scientist discusses the latest in quantum computing - 1000 bits stored in the electron spins of a single polymer molecule. Add in a recent release of the how-to for the complete quantum computer, qubits that work, and it may not be much longer before Google is running on a server the size of a sugar cube."
So the scientists have succeeded in encoding a tiny black and white picture on a polymer molecule. Hooray! Another tiny step for science, but a giant leap for mankind. However, realitically, I don't think Google will be running on a sugar-cube sized memory bank any day now. The money to move that kind of infrastructure onto a quantum computer is unthinkable.
So, a wonderful step forward....but there are still many many steps left.
Sincerely, your local cynic
"To make apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe." -Carl Sagan
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." --Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943
There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." --Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
Just because you don't see the possibilities inherent in something does not mean that the thing has no value or is not relevant.
Besides, with the way things are moving, I can imagine the possibility of a computer that needs no clumsy interface cables, no removable media, and such... We're moving closer to being able to make systems that truly have no moving parts.
After all, there was a time when computers were built around the size and heat of vacuum tubes. Someday, probably not all that long, the interface mechanisms, storage devices and display systems we use today will be as quaint as a vacuum-tube driven computer programmed by hard-wiring it seems to us now.
regular joe bloes will, IMHO, be very comfortable with quad 2GHz HT Pentium 4s... for a decade at least
The entire history of consumer electronics belies this statement. People demonstrably don't by a system because it's sufficient for their needs, they buy it because it's the most powerful one available.
If they make it, they'll buy it. Whether or not there's a good reason for them to need that kind of power. All that will be required is for the manufacturers be able to make it affordable enough or sell it well enough to make people see it as affordable enough.
After all, my cell phone (and maybe my calculator) has more raw memory and computing power than the computer used by the men who flew to the Moon.
so we can store information on a molecule, but how big was the machine that created the spins? And how long did it take to process the 1's and 0's on the molecule?
Sure, we could store information on molecules, but the speed and the size of the machines involved would put us back to working with punch cards...
What needs to be done simultaneously is to improve the method in which we induce and read the spin in molecules, or those sugar cube sized computers will just be expensive and slow RAM inside a computer the size of a room...
Actually, this is not so true in today's economy. Most manufacturers are pretty screwd since less and less people must replace their machines. Fewer applications manage to outrun the hardware innovation (games for the most part, but they need the graphic card more than a processor). For example (though people do not believe me) I run windows 2000 on PII-300/96Ram and if not for the games would not have the slightest need to upgrade.
After all, my cell phone (and maybe my calculator) has more raw memory and computing power than the computer used by the men who flew to the Moon.
I might be wrong here, but I thought that the moon computer is actually not so powerful. Life critical uses tend to be very conservative and run software that has been tested for decades... thus I am pretty sure their hardware is reliable but not the newest.
I'm confused - were you born this year?
Don't believe the nonsense, unless you hear it from me directly.
First, here is the abstract for the article.
Second, it doesn't work, at least not the way they say it does. You can't store 1024 bits in the nuclear magnetic spins of a 19 atom molecule!
Or more precisely, you can't retrieve that many bits. The spin state of a nucleus can be described by a complex number, but when you do a measurement you only get one bit out. With 19 nuclei you can read out only about 19 bits.
So how do they make it work? They've got a huge number of molecules there. Each one is loaded with the same data value. Using the redundancy in those molecules, the researchers can read out the 1024 bits. But if they had only a single molecule holding the value in its nuclear spins, as the paper implies, there's no way they could read out 1024 bits. So the density is not as high as they make it sound.
The researchers fired an electromagnetic pulse containing 1024 different radio frequencies close to 400 megahertz at the molecule
Gee...if it takes that many requencies to read 1024 bits, imagine how many you'd need to access the memory space of the average desktop PC. You'd need the whole damn electromagnetic spectrum! I wonder if the FCC will grant them a license for that?
-ted
This article is about storage, not processing. And quantum bits of this type are pretty damn dense. Guess what--Google needs to store a lot of data. Yes, the experiment described isn't much more than an interesting proof-of-concept, but there is tremendous promise. "Google in a cube" is a bit of journalistic license, but I'll still be impressed when we're putting just the Google cache into a sugar cube.
~Idarubicin
Not true. Take a picture, compress it - there are plenty of lossless compression schemes. Once compressed to a certain point you cannot go beyond that, but that's far from infinite compression.