Bulk Technology Might Produce Molecular Computers

PerlDiver writes "Researchers for UCLA and Hewlett-Packard have announced the creation of molecular logic gates utilizing rotoxane. " Consider this to be my little touch of nanotechnology today.

Comments

Re:Speed and Size

[dattaway]

Sounds like hype with no details how these crystals differ from silicon crystals or its electrical charges are different from CMOS electrical charges. Sounds to me like they just have developed a new semiconductor based on a different crystal structure. Imune to computer viruses, crashes, and other glitches? That sounds like more of a quality of software programming. You can program with hardware, aka PALs and such, but one still needs to program sensible logic, such as disallowing macros in documents, granting root permissions for everyone to change the system, etc.

Hype, hype, hype, no juicy details.

Re:Speed and Size

[Mawbid]

I think I get what they're driving at. Concentrate on the "...permanently, doing away with the need to erase files" part. They seem to be talking about append-only storage. Using such storage you can presumably design a safer system, one where a virus can't insert itself into a preexisting binary because it's read-only, where hackers and absent-minded sysadmins can't erase or alter the system (think logs, specifically), where a crash can't corrupt the filesystem. Any vast storage device makes this practical, regardless of what technology is used to implement the vast storage.

The tricky part would be to safely manage overrides. You'd want to alter files by writing a new one that overrides the old one, but then you've got some of your old problems again.

Has this kind of thing been studied at all? It looks interesting.
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Theoretical limits...

[Signal 11]

This is really directed towards the quantum physics geeks out there...

What is the theoretical maximum speed for a computer? I mean, we can't go faster than the speed of light - and that's quickly being approached. Where a single electron can mean off or on... the speed of a computer will be limited solely by the speed of light in the near future. Which means massive parallelism will be the *only* way to go faster. Moore's law will be broken eventually... I wonder when.



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Re:Speed and Size

[parallax]

As far as I can tell crash/virus immunity is pure nonsense -- In a formal sense, a computer that can't crash would need to solve the halting problem (or else how would it know that the computer had crashed or was simply taking a long time to execute an algorithm) which is provably impossible. Likewise, a virus is simply another type of program. In order to make a machine completely immune to viruses you have to make it immune to programming, and you don't have a computer any more.

I'm guessing that they meant that if you have millions of processors, crashing/hanging a few doesn't make a difference. I don't buy this, because having all the processors in the world doesn't make a difference if your code won't run reliably on one. Put another way, sucky software still sucks no matter how many computers you run it on. Likewise, I could easily imagine a virus spreading through the entire molecular computer and rendering all of those millions of processors useless.

The small size and low-power consumption of molecular computers would be great, but there is a long way to go from building a few molecular logic gates in a laboratory and constructing a real machine capable of doing interesting work. My guess is that etched chips are here to stay for the next ten years or so, but if someone hands me a working molecular computer tomorrow I'll start work on the Linux port right away. :)

Re:Rather than Diamond Age, try...

[WillWare]

read Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (full text online)

Engines of Creation is here. Another good book, a somewhat breezier read, is Unbounding the Future .

build a nanocomputer ... and you're no less prone to bugs and viruses

That's certainly true. A computer involves many layers of abstraction, with logic gates near the bottom and operating systems and applications near the top. The article appears to be describing an innovation at the gate level. Desirable to be sure, but it is unlikely to change the computer at an architectural level.

I might be wrong about that. I went to a talk on reversible computing, which you'd think would have relevance only at the lowest levels of abstraction. It ends up having ramifications all the way up, if you want to implement reversibility completely. (We can probably get almost all the benefit of reversibility with incomplete implementations.)

Now I understand...

[jabber]

The void look in my PHB's eyes..

That bead of drool lowly rolling down his chin in staff meetings.

The PHB has been slashdotted!!

More details in SF Chronicle

[rjrjr]

The San Francisco Chronicle has a much better article. More technical details are toward the end.

Interesting: in the print edition, this was the lead article, page one, above the fold, top right. Also, there was a decent graphic (which I can't find online) accompanying the article.

Human integrated nanotech

[TheIneffable]

Implanting nanotech computers in people is cool; that is not disputed. We do, however, need to look at the possible downsides, as these buggers might prove to have some rather dark side effects, especially because with computers that size, molecular manipulation is a viable peripheral option.
E.g.:
1. "Your trial period for WinZip is now over, and you have selected not to uninstall. Thank you for using WinZip, and please enjoy our complementary copy of eHerpes 5.0"
2. "System resource conflict with HP SCSI mini-CD drive and Generic Liver."
3. "Speak to me! You're alive, I know it! God, why did I install NT on my brother?"
4. "Man, it's hell when you're in a job interview and you get some porn site's spam."