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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".
AccountKiller
...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!
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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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.
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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