Physicist Proposes a New Type of Computing

SpankiMonki writes "Joshua Turner, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, has proposed using the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom as a new means to generate the binary states used in computing. Turner calls his idea orbital computing. Turner points to recent discoveries (including a new material that allows rapid switching of its electron states and new low-power terahertz laser technology) that could lead to the development of a computer with vastly improved performance over current technologies."

Comments

Imagine one of these running Android!

[Anonymous Coward]

The catch is that to generate a tight enough pulse of sufficient intensity to do this, you need an accelerator two miles long. But if you manage that, you can switch electron states 10,000 times faster than transistor states can be switched.

Ok, so it won't be a portable device...

Re:Imagine one of these running Android!

[Zalbik]

Ok, so it won't be a portable device...

No, but imagine a beowulf cluster of....

nevermind...

Ray was right!

[NoImNotNineVolt]

Here comes the singularity!

Disclaimer: posted in jest to rile up all the Kurzweil haters. Where's your "hit the limit of silicon" argument now, huh? :P

Re:Ray was right!

[Anonymous Coward]

For one thing, in his estimates he adheres to the transistor = neuron fallacy.

To be fair, a digitally-switching transistor is almost infinitely simpler than a neuron, but you could make the argument that a transistor configured in analog mode that summed several inputs and acted as a decision maker is much closer to a neuron. The trick is getting all of those transistors working together in some sort of "analog computer" fashion, as the brain's network reconfigures itself quite a bit, which is a lot harder to achieve at billion-scale on a die.

Who's got the money to pony up for some experimental fab runs for billions of transistors with reconfigurable mesh network? This is basically an Intel i7 fab process we're talking about here, so think beeeeelions of dollars.

Re:Ray was right!

[ceoyoyo]

You're making up numbers. We've had billions of transistors on chips for some time now. The XBox One's main chip has five billion transistors. And that's just one chip. The Titan supercomputer has nearly 200 trillion transistors.

If the transistor doubling time remains about the same, you can equate any number of transistors you like to a neuron and Kurzweil's prediction still won't be off by much. Such is the nature of exponential curves. Sophisticated objections to his predictions don't involve transistor counts.

Nobody knows how much of a neuron you need to build a brain. If you actually have to simulate it, possibly at the quantum level, then no number of transistors may be sufficient. You can probably get around that problem by not using regular transistors though. Sufficient artificial neurons might actually be easier to build - noise and interference are probably not as harmful as they are in regular computing, and may actually be beneficial.

New Type of "Computing"

[Tyler Durden]

When I first read the headline I thought the physicist was offering a computational model alternative to the Turing Machine. It sounds like he's offering a new type of computer, not computing.

Re:New Type of "Computing"

[thesandbender]

Actually, it could prove to be radically different than current computers/computing. Almost all current computers are based on binary logic, your bit is either on or off. Electrons can actually have several orbital states so it is possible that computing could be approached in a different manner. This assumes that logic could actually be performed with the orbital states and it's not just a bit store. All of this is quite a long way off though, per the article you currently need a two mile long accelerator to change the orbital state of an electron this accurately.

Re:New Type of "Computing"

[thesandbender]

You did mis-read the article. They're not proposing it as a quantum computing solution, nor are they proposing to improve RAM speeds by using electron spin. They're proposing to use the electron orbital state to store information. Currently a charge (multiple electrons) are used to store one bit. This solution would allow one single electron to store one or more bits. This could be used to produce faster storage but it has other applications as well, such as faster switching logic. The end result would be a substantially faster computer and improved information density but it will still be deterministic.
I'm not sure how you inferred any claims to quantum computing or NDTM's from that article.

Re:New Type of "Computing"

[Anubis IV]

Quantum computers already eschew binary thinking with the way that they manage their data, but they are still simply Turing Machines, albeit, theoretically much faster Turing Machines. But given enough time and memory, a classical computer is capable of perfectly simulating a quantum computer, and at least based on the summary, it sounds like the same would be the case here.

This may be something neat, but unless it offers something more than a new way to represent bits, it won't mean that we can solve new sets of problems. It may, however, offer the possibility of solving (some) sets of problems faster than traditional computers, in much the same way that quantum computers may be able to do so.

How fast is the observation?

[pieisgood]

So we can switch states really fast, which is excellent, but how fast is our observation? If the observation needs to be made in order to switch to the next gate then we have our bottle neck. The article was sparse on details and didn't seem to answer this question.

Spintronics

[Anonymous Coward]

Whatever happened with Spintronics?

In theory these systems could be great. What I worry about is if they will be stable enough.

Of course, this is using orbitals, which generally are a more stable element with regards to electrons and their speedy existence.
I don't think they decay spontaneously, do they?

With all these ideas, it makes me wonder what one is going to come first, this, optical computing, quantum computing, superconductive computing, ternary computing and others.
I'd love to see Ternary, personally, Binary is awful, Balanced Ternary is beauty.
Of course, with this, it'd probably be possible to make use or higher bases. You'd probably even be able to make complex gates with for them. (well, you only need NAND or NOR really)

The most important question ever

[NapalmV]

Does it run Office?

Re:The most important question ever

[gman003]

Crysis 3 is the new king of card tests, followed by Battlefield 3/4 and Metro: Last Light. Crysis 1 sees some benchmarking still, but since it can be maxed out fairly easily now (60FPS at max settings, 1080p on a single 280X or 770) it's no longer a true system-killer.

If you're asking where Crysis 2 is on the list, well, it isn't.

Re:New push for inovations?

[fisted]

I'm dreaming of a technology to finally teach people where and where not to use apostrophes.

Re:New push for inovations?

[serviscope_minor]

I'm dreaming of a technology to finally teach people where and where not to use apostrophes.

Well, for all intense purposes the apostrophe's are fine and no barrier to understanding irregardless of weather or not they are bad grammer.

Re:New push for inovations?

[fisted]

So I cnocldue tihs is fien to? portip: i'ts a godo idae to use porper splelnig adn garmmar aynway. Raeliez wyh?