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."
it may not be much longer before Google is running on a server the size of a sugar cube
"Hey Johnny, where did the new $100,000 server go?"
"I don't know... I had it right here on the table!"
"Oh shit! I put it in my coffee! That's why it tasted kind of funny."
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
But these molecular photos are so tiny. I can barely see them without my glasses.
...is it clean in other dimensions?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Does anyone know if Synchrotrons, like the one in Saskatoon, SK, Canada play a part in researching molecular computers? The article mentions a magnetic imaging device. Is that like a synchrotron?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
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
doesn't hitting it with the second radio burst kill the conformation you've made with the first?
...
...
and isn't the first conformation likely to change spontaneously anyway (we're only talking about spin here, not orbitals). maybe they sit in the middle conformation or something, like benzene double bonds
i can feel the organic chem rusting in my brain weekly; it's almost gone now
nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) instrument.
I've done NMR, it takes ages. Preparing the sample takes about 30 minutes. Running the NMR takes between 1 and 20 minutes depending on what you're measuring. Analysing the results depends on how good you are.
I can't see google using this any time soon.
If they could just fit 24 more on there, it would be a much easier number to work with...
That's not a soda... it's a caffeine delivery device!
Sure, biochemists might need the massively paralell processing power to do molecular folding analysis, but regular joe bloes will, IMHO, be very comfortable with quad 2GHz HT Pentium 4s... for a decade at least.
I feel there will be a rift like there was in the old days when mainframe systems were few and expensive, and the rest were smaller systems.
Frankly, Quantum doesn't titillate me as much as a nice new nVidida chip at this point.
The other thing is that massively powerfull paralel processing isn't always a Good Thing. It's just A Thing. Take for example early Pentium Pros which had 16 stage pipelines. Nice in concept, but unless you use it properly, it's not really usefull. Many problems aren't massively parallel... The brain for example, is massively parallel, but not in the sense that many mean: all of your brain isn't adding two million 4 bit integers at the same time. It's doing millions of different tasks...
Sunday night... must sleep... must shadap.
I have to wonder what type of redundancy and error correction will have to be built into quantum computing. With all sorts of EM disturbances that are recoverable in atomic-level computing like we have today, what will happen when we go that small? I'm not necessarily asserting that it will happen, but that we need to understand the phenomena in all sorts of usage, including high-altitude applications and cosmic rays. The one thing we take for granted in modern electronics, particularly storage devices, is their hard resiliency to soft errors (i.e. soft errors don't necessarily translate to hard errors).
"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.
Moreover, the peculiarities that make quantum computing interesting (e.g. the ability to factorize in polynomial time) also make it completely inappropriate for mundane tasks. So please stop the "google in a cube" shit.
The Raven
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.
To everyone who has so far commented: so what?
My mother was born in 1947. The transistor was also invented in 1947, by Shockley. 55 years later, I got her a new computer for Christmas.
What will I see when I turn 55? I can't wait to find out.
Will quantum computing make using database table indexes obsolete? ie. will the time saved by using an index be small enough that it's not worth the effort to create/maintain one (for most uses)?
Sounds like "what-if" analysis will be taken to a new extreme, big time.
"What's the matter, someone shit in your coffee? Maybe you need more sugar..."
/BritshAccent
It's a bit nutty.
This nanotechnology would help make some really cool spy and surveillance technology.
Just what we need, better forms of privacy invasion! Hooray!
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...
pocket sized google?
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these
"ducks"
I wish my computer were the size of a suger cube, lan parties would be easy, just stick my computer in my pocket and go though a suger cube monitor might not be as nice.......
"hey stop shooting at my I droped my magnifying glass"
...now we can use the pinnacle of scientific knowledge, quantum mechanics, to store more pr0n. I'm just so proud to be a human these days...
Alcohol and Calculus don't mix. Don't drink and derive.
That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If I can fit four images on a single floppy disc, what if one of those images was of the floppy drive itself... Woah
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Imagine a RAID array of sugar cubes. That'd be sweet!
I can argue of a future where the emphasis is on the Mobo that can house up to 32 CPUs. and the new AMD Thunderfolts that are so small you can actually fit 32 of them in a mini ATX case... With very low power consumption, and low heat emissions. And big hdd capacity, and loads of RAM, and high bandwidth, and this and that...
People will have many gimicks to market before they run out of ideas and turn back to the speed issue of a CPU.
Once again, IMHO.
Are any of those tasks particularly interesting for you? Unless you're a physicist or the NSA, I doubt it.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
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.
It depends on the resolution of your camera. If the picture's resolution was good enough to see the actual data on a disc... then I doubt it would fit on the disc.
Sex - Find It
First of all you cant take pictures of atoms. Light of the wavelengths we see cannot give us a clear enough picture. Once you start putting enough energy into light to get the waves small enough to see whats going on the Heisenburg uncertainty theorum kicks and and its all useless info.
Ok so assuming you could take a picture of an atom it would still not do you any good. The data is stored in the spin of the electrons. Just as you cannot take a picture of voltage (like the computer your using to read this uses to keep track of bits) you cannot take a picture of spin.
So still assuming you can take a picture of these atoms a picture only shows color/location but if you film a spinning ball it wont look different than a still one. You would not be able to tell the differance between a 1 or 0.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
So how many library of congresses will fit into one sugar cube?
A server the size of a sugar cube would be pretty sweet.
I believe you, and I pity you, w2k without a single app on it crawls on p2/400 with 128mb of ram. It's unbearably slow, you have to actually wait for things to open. Now there are other OS's that run quite well on a system of that speed, it is after all plenty of computing power for anything less bloated than win2k. NT 4 would be quite smooth, Linux, win98se, but win2k or XP crawl on systems that slow.
True, it probably takes a massive machine to make the itty-bitty data storage. Until they can miniaturize that equipment, though, I'm sure there will still be a good market for massive ROMs. Lots of read-only storage in a little container. Of course, the access device has to be small enough, but I can see a middle-ground.
Industrial CD-pressing machines are pretty huge, but the read-only data they create is incredibly mobile.
It all goes downhill from first post
Sure, biochemists might need the massively paralell processing power to do molecular folding analysis, but regular joe bloes will, IMHO, be very comfortable with quad 2GHz HT Pentium 4s... for a decade at least.
True, but it sure would be nice to:
1. Get the power consumption way, way down--say, to 1W or less.
2. Along the same lines, get rid of the processor fans and heak sinks and pave the way for a much smaller form factor.
You are incorrect. Classical computers can search an indexed database in log(n) time. Grover's algorithm allows quantum searches to be much faster, perhaps even in constant time. Search engines could benefit immensely from quantum computing.
Lots of information can be found on Lov Grover's quantum search algorithm. Do a search for it on Google. Dr. Dobb's even analyzed the quantum source code for the algorithm. Pretty cool stuff.
"Sure, biochemists might need the massively paralell processing power to do molecular folding analysis, but regular joe bloes will, IMHO, be very comfortable with quad 2GHz HT Pentium 4s... for a decade at least."
You say that now, but you haven't seen the next version of Office yet...
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.
that's the point :) an image of data complete enough to reconstruct the original data, in any way shape or form, _must_ take up more space than the data itself, or we'd have the problem of infinite compression, and the universe would disappear in a poof of smoke :)
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
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
That's what happens when you have ST:TNG and Voyager merged into one :-)
That's a fucking big sugar cube.
Free Java games for your phone: Tontie, Sokoban
If a single molecule can store an image, what happens if you tell it to store a picture of itself in action? Do you get one of those camcorder-pointed-at-monitor recursive brainfarts?
Is taking a picture of several of them with a scanning electron microscope, in effect, compression? =)
My
Limekiller
--A picture of your wife contains video of your wedding.
--Blind people "see" data encoded on their surroundings.
--Bullets are encoded with their manufacturer, who sold it, and who bought it. Even if it's in fragments.
--Sentient coatings (sort of). Smart liquids.
--Something else for Microsoft to claim they invented.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
...picture a sugar cube the size of a server? No? OK, I'll go to sleep now.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Blah blah blah
...and other neobabble.
The quantum states of phosphorus atoms are particularly long-lived,
The article tells us basically nothing real, except the names of a few people and that they're working on something called "quantum" computing.
So here's how it should work (off the top of my head):
An atom or molecule (a collection of particles) has a set of wave-equation solutions. Each of solutions corresponds to a single point in a lattice, whose coordinates are the quantum numbers; or a single value of an n-tuple whose indices are the quantum numbers; or a single member of a set of n-tuples each of which is identified by a unique combination of quantum numbers...however you want to express it. These quantum numbers are inserted into the wave equation and out pops a solution--a wave-function--that does not diverge or otherwise go kaput.
If the atom, molecule, collection of particles, etc., is in one state (one combination of quantum numbers; one wavefunction), it's just a matter of applying energy in the right way to push it into another state. The quantum numbers move to a new point in the lattice, you change the n-tuple indices, whatever. You really cause the wavefunction to change, and the spatial arrangement available to the particles moving in the system changes. A spherical shell becomes a dumb-bell shape (not really, but it's a simpler visual than what really happens, so go with it).
Now you have a binary memory system. Most systems have way more than two states, but only a few will be stable (metastable, actually) enough to be useful for computation. But trinary, quaternary, etc. are certainly not out of the question; though the question is a lot easier if you can still use all this software expertise that has binary math running through its veins.
Quantum calculations are a lot harder to grok than quantum memory. Something has to work so that the state of the memory actuates another part of the system to undergo a change on a quantum level from one stable state (n-tuple value/wavefunction) to another.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would get involved, so the family of states you use would have to be pretty special to keep the particles in knowable states. I think that's what the reporter was really getting at when talking about the phosphorus thing.
That way for Opteron AMD decided to give each
chip its on die northbridge, with local memory
and let Opterons talk to each other using high-speed but thin (16-bit) Hypertransport links.
Which means even 4 way SMP boards are simple
and have need only 4 layers. Even then 32-way
on one board might still be hard to do.
Mmmm, sugar...
Money for nothing, pix for free
if you want some details on how it's done, read my other post.
Um... the other posts by username "Anonymous Coward" all involve a website called goatse, whatever that is.
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive. If you make a slip in handling us you die!
... a bowl full of these...
down at the cafeteria... or maybe it was just a box of sugar cubes?
Show me one case where you can take a picture of (lz?) compressed data and somehow compress the resulting image to less size than the original data, retaining all the information.
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
Does anyone know if Synchrotrons, like the one in Saskatoon, SK, Canada play a part in researching molecular computers?
No, not at all.
The article mentions a magnetic imaging device.
Is that like a synchrotron?
No, not at all.
Syncrotrons produce gamma/X-rays. Expose a polymer to some of those, and it won't stay a polymer for long..
NMR instruments (and MRI devices) use radio waves. Much longer wavelength, much lower energy.
The only similarity I can think of is that both use big magnetic fields, but for different reasons.
(syncrotrons use them to accelerate particles, NMR machines use them to split the spin energy levels)
Well the part of this that actually stores data may be the size of a sugarcube, but if you've ever seen the size of a 400MHz NMR I think you might reconsider your statement. (oh, and leave your wallet at home when you go to work to avoid the NMR's huge magnet going through your credit cards.)
You forget the informal version of Grosch's Law: "No matter how clever the hardware boys are, the software boys will [urinate] it away." Besides, there are a lot of problems that require massive parallelism to do even semi-efficiently (unless someone proves that P=NP). Some of them are of major interest to compiler and operating system writers.
If you can't peek at the insides of a quantum computer, what would a debugger look like?
There's a reason why we don't see software that uses these. Because, well, um, I mentioned that it'd take until the end of the universe, right? Same reason you didn't see a lot of realtime 3d games being sold in the 70s.
First you get the sugar. Then you get the power. Then you get the women...
Don't mod me down without following the link, please.
Whoever stated that signature sizes should be limited to one hundred and twenty characters can just go ahead and kiss my
Who said that a picture has to use light? Anyway, we have taken pictures of individual atoms using optical photography.
Writing With Atoms
Imaging Atoms at Sub-Angstrom Resolution with a Corrected Electron Microscope
Bell Labs researchers invent technique for imaging single impurity atoms within silicon
Imaging Bose-Einstein Condensates
Trapped Atoms Photo
Single Atoms in a MOT
Taking stuff apart since 1969 (TM)