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."

Comments

Re:This could be the breakthrough...

[Polarina]

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

Thats cheating

[imsabbel]

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"

Re:Thats cheating

[Platinumrat]

And that was exactly my final year Physics project, in 1984. Take a slide image, shine a laser through it, put that through a lense. The FFT would be formed at the focal point. We then could apply frequency filters (as another slide) and with another lense I could reconstruct the image (less filtered images). So with modern technology, ie LCD screens and cameras, you could dynamically FFT, filter and reconstruct moving images in real time.

Quantum computers aren't X times faster.

[Vellmont]

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".

Show me a single molecule quantum device

[BitZtream]

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.

Re:This could be the breakthrough...

[Interoperable]

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.