The Nanomechanical Computer

eldavojohn writes "The BBC is reporting on a newly proposed type of nanomechanical computer that mimics J. H. Müller & Charles Babbage's work on mechanical computational devices — just on a much smaller scale. The paper is published today in the New Journal of Physics and cites three reasons to build a computer with nanomechanical transistors over bipolar-junction or field-effect transistors: '(i) mechanical elements are more robust to electromagnetic shocks than current dynamic random access memory based purely on complimentary metal oxide semiconductor technology, (ii) the power dissipated can be orders of magnitude below CMOS, and (iii) the operating temperature of such an NMC can be an order of magnitude above that of conventional CMOS.'"

Comments

No "Diamond Age" in the tagging?

[warrior]

Neal Stephenson wrote a book about this kind of tech back in 1995 or so, entitled "The Diamond Age" (or "A Young Girl's Primer or something like that). He envisions some pretty incredible stuff made out of this tech. Great book, lots of nerdy CS-type stuff in it. Go to the library and pick it up, very fun stuff. I think this one of his works is very underrated. If we can actually engineer stuff like this it would be impressive, indeed.

Wrong, actually

[Moraelin]

The reason Babbage had problems completing the project was that it required precision and standardization unparalleled in any previous project. The design and concept was there, the production capabilities lagged severely behind.

Wrong, actually. The machine that was built at the end of the 20'th century was built with the precision and tolerances of the 19'th century. Deliberately, to show that it was possible.

The precision argument is even more obviously false, when you look at the fact that very precise watches had existed for a long time. That's how they measured longitude before GPS. I use watches as an example, because they're cog-based machines too, and they required even higher precision. By the middle of the _18'th_ century (i.e., a century earlier than Babbage) even a pocket watch would already not deviate more than a minute per day, and the second hand gradually became common. (Previously they tended to have only hours and minutes hands.)

The first practical nautical clock, John Harrison's H4 was first used aboard the ship Deptford which set sail for Jamaica on 18 November 1761 and actually arrived there on 19 January 1762. That's two months and a day at sea. After all that time, it was only off by 5.1 seconds.

_That_ is the kind of accuracy that was already available a century before Babbage.

Babbage's design didn't even need that kind of accuracy, since it was essentially a digital device. All that mattered was how many teeth of the cog had moved, not also to do it within a very exact time interval. Half the sources of inaccuracy of a watch, didn't even apply there.

So, no, Babbage had no excuse. The production capabilities were there, the precision was enough, and standardization wasn't even necessary for a prototype. He just couldn't be arsed to actually deliver what he promised. Full stop.

Re:You don't need our permission

[CarpetShark]

what are you waiting for? Pay the $10,000

Perhaps he's waiting for the $10,000, or perhaps he knows that theory is the important thing, and if it's viable, there will be many organisations vying for better and better implementations.

This is like half science.. "Here's my hypothesis, someone test it for me."

I for one don't consider science to be something that only people with money do. One has to wonder how many da Vinci's there would have been, if other people all had the resources he had. The renaissance itself shows that progress pops up everywhere, given resources. Doesn't mean the science wasn't there in the back of people's minds, waiting for them to get past the point of scraping together money for a loaf of bread, though.

Reversible Computing?

[martyb]

I know this is /. and actually reading the article is unusual, but *I* did and came upon this:

A computing architecture made from nanomechanical transistors thus is competitive with 45 nm CMOS technology Note 2, while taking a step towards enabling reversible computing. (emphasis added)

I would LOVE to see THAT happen!

<dream>Whenever a program crashes, just open the debugger, run it backwards until it gets "weird". Run it forwards and backwards again to isolate where it's broken. Of course, there are some problems with asynchronous signals (disk I/O, keyboard, mouse, etc.) but I can dream, can't I?</dream>

But seriously, could this just be something thrown in to help get more funding or is it an actual possibility?