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1 Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster Than a PC
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."
I think we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing as humans get better and better at organizing matter into computing machines. The future is looking very very bright!
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This would more likely break Moore's Law since this molecule isn't a transistor.
Add more table salt.
In a way. thats just the same as claiming a laser can caluclate a 2D FFT if you look at the frauenhofer diffraction of an aperture.
Or that single candle can render better than any GPU by the way a room looks like when its illuminated by it.
You just have to redefine a basic property of your system as "calculation"
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
I really hate it when people come up with the simple "Quantum computer 1000 times faster than conventional computer". It's not just overly simplistic, it's wrong.
Quantum computers can turn some problems that require exponential time to solve into a polynomial time. So instead of taking 2^n time, it might take n^3 time. That's cannot in any realistic way be described as being "X times faster".
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...one molecule ought to be enough for anybody!
I've never seen a quantum computing device smaller than the size of a small room, so I'm not really sure how fair it is to compare it to a PC.
Really the PC doesn't even use full atoms for calculations, it uses electrons and electron holes in the atoms, and its at least 2000 times smaller than any quantum device I've seen.
You don't really get to say its one molecule when its a device made up of a fuckton of molecules and you are comparing too it a PC which uses subatomic elements to actually do the work.
You have a fast calculator ... the size of a room ... which I can put 2000 slower and easier to make calculators in and end up faster.
Sure, eventually, they'll make it smaller and smaller, but your comparison is like saying using an f16 to deliver mail is faster than using a postal truck to deliver milk. Just because you make two statements that share a verb doesn't mean you've made a comparison thats in any way meaningful.
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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.
A one molecule computer faster than a PC. I find that hard to believe. My Asus Netbook is powered by one "atom", and it's still dog slow.
Take Nobody's Word For It.
So we can make improbability machines and then in 10 years an infinite improbability drive?
Probably.
http://physics.aps.org/pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.104.180501.pdf
Bah! People need to stop complaining when it turns out that an important incremental advance in the field of quantum computing isn't already a commercially viable quantum computer that's being integrated into a chip for release next week. There won't be commercially viable products for many years to come. What is needed many, many incremental improvements in a broad variety of disciplines. None of the proof-of-principle experiments around today are attempting to be demonstrations of viable technology. This experiment demonstrates that am arbitrary quantum state can be deterministically written to the vibrational modes of a molecule, allowed to evolve and be read out by projective measurement. It is an important result because it helps open a new avenue of attack: vibrational energy levels in molecules.
The experiment is a beast that requires expensive, ultra-fast lasers, pulse shaping optics, and a molecular jet. It won't be integrated into PCI expansion card anytime soon but the fact that it is possible to coherently prepare superpositions of vibrational modes in molecules is interesting in its own right and is potentially important for quantum computation. Another decade or three of fundamental research and well funded grad students (ha) are going to be required before we can expect a commercial application.
So if this is the future...where's my jet pack?
It would be like a whole fraction of a millimeter across! Careful! You'll step on the datacenter!
It's worth noting that this work was done on a lab table, so it hasn't been miniaturized just yet. But if/when they do that, then it would count, would it not?
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The ultimate improbability bomb...I like it. The advertising slogan could be "yes, God DOES play dice with the world...and you can, too!"
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No. NP-complete is different from NP. There are several NP (but not NP-complete) problems that quantum computers can solve in polynomial time: integer factoring, for example.
One time pads already are unbreakable.
I think the real question should be how many measurements per second can you do.
This is what standard computes do. To get the next step, you have to measure/read the previous state. So you have just zero or one, because that is the easiest to measure. Then you measure in gigahertz.
How many measurements per second can quantum computers do?
So we can make improbability machines and then in 10 years an infinite improbability drive?
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This P-value and the P-value you're thinking of aren't the same. Ordinarily, when we think of P-value, we're thinking of errors caused by statistical chance, errors in the data and so on. However, in quantum computing, even purely mathematical computations have a probability of correctness. In other words, when you add 2 + 2 with a quantum computer, you don't get 4. You get 4 (p=.95). When you evaluate the mathematical function, you get the result, plus a probability of that result being the correct result.
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.
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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!
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.
I really don't know. I'm more familiar with the 0s or 1s concept than I am with 0s AND 1s. In other words, I haven't really understood how being able to assume more than one state simultaneously in quantum computers is so much better than our binary computers that we have now.
The literature that I've read in the press seems unanimous in stating that quantum computers are going to be better than conventional computers. This is particularly evident with respect to encryption and searching. I am now beginning to wonder if it is even possible to explain it to a layperson like myself.
Good question, though. Sorry I can't answer it.
The diversity and expression of human opinion is essential to human survival.
Don't get me wrong, I think reasonable skepticism and questioning of authority is necessary. I will go so far as to say that if I have equal reason to accept or question authority, I will doubtless land on the questioning side. But no further. Unreasonable skepticism is as idiotic as unreasonable faith.
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
I think its something around 305 Library of Congress per second but my math might be off.
Moore's law
Moore's 'law' isn't a law of nature (or of humans) in any meaningful sense. It's a conjecture, a guess, a prediction, and nothing more. Why people who are supposedly rational cling to it as some unchanging constant of nature mystifies me. Why even bother to argue about whether it is true or not? It's already completely out of date, in that he wisely limited his guess to 10 years, up to 001975.
If Moore's conjecture is broken, or has already been, so what? Have any fundamental laws of physics been violated, has our understanding of the world changed one iota? It was an interesting guess in its time about the progress of technology, and was not, so far as I know, intended to last forever.
It was indeed a mere observation of conjuncture. That said, it has been an extraordinarily useful one in the form of a challenge to humankind. Without it we would not have progressed the way we have. Intel is using Moore's law as a road map, forcing other companies *coughAMDcough* to innovate just to keep up. And that is why we have the enormous speeds available today. So we have a prediction that shaped the future. Why bother? Because our dreams shape our world.
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The simplest explanation I can offer is that, at the quantum level, moving bare information (yes, even abstract ones and zeros) from one location to another to perform calculations runs into a bottleneck due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principal. The simple act of measuring (for example, reading a bit out of RAM or out of a CPU register) gets more and more disruptive to increasingly small systems.
Quantum computing is not magic, but it does differ from the classical approach in that you perform a lot of your calculating horsepower inside of closed systems wherein, afterwards, reading the result destroys the system — much like smashing a piggy-bank. You introduce your input data into a system at a certain quantum ground state, and as each input is introduced the system transforms from one wave-function to another, performing your calculation in a manner that might even be considered "analog", as quantization only occurs at the time of measurement. Once all the input is introduced, you then measure the system to obtain your output. This measurement destroys the system, and only provides an "answer", none of the interim calculations survive.
The seeming magic is in the fact that the interim calculations are carried out in a system entirely isolated from outside causality. We are accustomed to measuring the effectiveness of a system component such as an integrated circuit by reading from and writing to it, and combining it's efforts in realtime with efforts from all across the machine in question. We are accustomed to thinking of information as entirely abstract, and that is a foundation of classical computing. In quantum computing, engineers understand that information is instead bulky, and at smaller scales you reach diminishing returns moving it across your machine. Performing calculations in localized, potentially mind-numbingly tiny closed systems neutralizes this drawback to moving information (in a word, causality) and allows otherwise incalculable gains in the speed and parallelization of information processing.
Let me try this from a different angle. If you are comfortable with simple physics concepts such as not being able to communicate faster than the speed of light, then you can easily grok the information processing bottleneck that fairly homogeneous physical principal imposes upon computing. For example, if you wired a CPU in New York to a stick of RAM in China, then it's just not possible to surpass seek times of 38 milliseconds. In practical terms you'd never be close, routing and switching and non-geodesic data paths would stymie your efforts so you might optimize those, but the bare fact of the bad design decision in placing your components murders your ultimate capability. If you became used to that level of computing limitation, you would probably even design your algorithms to make the best of that situation and rely as little upon seek time as possible.
Then, when a friend walks up to you using a relatively poorly constructed laptop whose CPU is located inches from the RAM, running an OS chock full of algorithms that don't fear seek time, then it's processing power and capabilities would simply knock you out of your chair by comparison. That cheap laptop is obviously not magic, but you are ham-strung by the expectations your New York / China computer has left you with.
Classical vs. Quantum computing is very much like that. We are, all of us, hamstrung by the implicit computational limitations of relative causality. We want to fetch data from the RAM and take it to the CPU to be processed. We want to move data from this portion of the CPU to that portion for more processing. The bottleneck we face is very related to the "speed of light" bottleneck, but it's not strictly the same. It is the bottleneck of causality itself: The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal. Information IS causality. Sending a message, be it by yelling across the house or making an example out of a fired employee or pumping electrons down copper wire always involves forcing one thing to cause th
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