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Stanford's Quantum Hologram Sets Storage Record
eldavojohn writes "It's often assumed that representing data reaches a limit when you get to the point that an atom represents one bit in some form or fashion. But Stanford University researchers have used a quantum hologram model to store the characters 'S' and 'U' by encoding the data at a rate of 35 bits per electron."
Sweet... now they're just a 'T' and 'F' away from writing something useful.
greed@All_Evils:~#
And by letting S=0 and U=1 we can now represent a bit using 70 bits! Oh wai-
They're storing data in a small space, sure, but it's got the same problem that traditional holograms do: it takes a good deal of computation time to figure out how to encode the information you want in wave patterns.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
That's why you need redundancy. Do I hear 2 atoms?
"By the time they had diminished from 50 to 8, the other dwarves began to suspect 'Hungry.'" -Gary Larson
So, would that leave you with a Redundant Independant Array of Atoms (RIAA)? Perfect for storing my music.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
If I understand holography and what they're doing correctly (and I DID work as a tech in Emmett Leith's lab so I have some clue), they're transforming the information.
Yes, each electron has information from 35 bits. But more than one electron has that same information, encoded differently. How many storage electrons do they need to encode it in a way that is recoverable?
The information per electron is the total information encoded divided by the total number of electrons needed to encode it at a high enough resolution to be recovered.
Also: The illustration of the way they're encoding it looks like it's not just electrons that encode it, but also their absence. Add in HOLES to the count of "things encoding the bits".
I'll be surprised if the total comes out to more than one bit per electron site. (Note that they may get more than one such site per atom.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Well that's good. At least we will be the last thing to be deleted on the vast cosmic hard drive.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's a logical end result of exponential growth.
Actually, that logic is flawed. The assumption that we will continue to see exponential growth forever in anything is pretty flawed, simply because of different laws kicking in. Look at trends in computer ownership, or TVs or anything else that hits its prime and hits it big. For a good while these things do have an exponential growth curve, but obviously that growth cannot continue indefinitely, or people would have to start buying two or three TV sets at a time every couple of days, and then the next week buy 3 TV sets every day, and then every hour....
This is the fundamental problem with extrapolation taken too far. The truth of the matter is that you have no idea what the curve looks like, regardless of how much data you have. It could be exponential growth for thousands of years, and then suddenly take a nose dive and drop back down close to where it started, or perhaps grow faster. Extrapolating too far is foolishness that happens far too often.
I've heard the discussion of converting all matter into computational elements, but a FAR more likely growth curve for computing power is not exponential, but sigmoidal.
Thus, I would argue that converting all matter into computational elements would be the asymptotic 'end game' of technology that we will never quite reach, but always be moving towards (though our progress will slow). Many growth patterns follow a sigmoidal curve.
I want the most bytes per MOLE next time I shop for a hard disk!
Radioactive storage anyone?
Then all your pr0n collection would decay after some time. Not a viable solution.
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