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1 Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster Than a PC

Posted by timothy on from the but-only-for-certain-tasks dept.

alexhiggins732 writes with this tantalizing PopSci snippet: "A demo of a quantum calculation carried out by Japanese researchers has yielded some pretty mind-blowing results: a single molecule can perform a complex calculation thousands of times faster than a conventional computer. A proof-of-principle test run of a discrete Fourier transform — a common calculation using spectral analysis and data compression, among other things — performed with a single iodine molecule transpired very well, putting all the molecules in your PC to shame."

6 of 246 comments (clear)

  1. Re:This could be the breakthrough... by Polarina · · Score: 5, Informative

    This would more likely break Moore's Law since this molecule isn't a transistor.

  2. Re:This could be the breakthrough... by thms · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the top of my head, among these limitations are:
    • It won't solve any NP complete or even hard problems faster than a few orders of magnitude.
    • It is probabilistic, so you still need old fashioned silicon around it, and still all results will come with a P-value.
    • They need quite good cooling, as in liquid nitrogen.
  3. Re:This could be the breakthrough... by blair1q · · Score: 4, Informative

    Moore's law isn't about the tip of high-tech research. It's about the leading edge of profitable manufacturing of computational devices.

    I.e., until someone like Applied Materials or KLA Tencor is done installing a fab line for this process node, you can't count it as a data point in the history of the law.

  4. Original article by tenco · · Score: 3, Informative

    http://physics.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.180501.pdf

  5. Re:This could be the breakthrough... by blankinthefill · · Score: 3, Informative

    Agree 100%! I mean, the first transistor was invented in 1947, and the first integrated circuit wasn't introduced until 1959, and the integrated circuit took even more years to make it into computing devices... and then even more years to evolve to a complexity that allowed the creation of the PC. And the science and engineering involved in those was kid stuff in comparison to many of these inventions. We're not even to the point of the transistor in quantum computing... This is probably more closely related to the Babbage's analytical engine!

  6. Re:This could be the breakthrough... by marcansoft · · Score: 3, Informative

    As I understand it, there's a trade-off between uncertainty and speed in quantum computing. You can get results faster, but you'll have a higher probability that your machine returns 2+2=5.

    The same goes for conventional computing. No computer is error-free, and bit errors can and do happen. There are unsolved/unsolvable problems in electronics like metastability that always come with a P-value which you can make as large as you want by trading off speed.

    Conventional computers are tuned such that the error rates are small enough that people can live with them (e.g. once a few months for crappy consumer hardware, or hopefully once every decade or more for proper servers). The question is whether quantum computing will still be faster after being tuned to similar error rates. There are also tricks you can use, such as ECCs and other types of parity for conventional computers. For example, on quantum computing you can have several computers running the same problem and then require that they agree on the result.