Do you think Coke cans might last 200,000,000 years? I'm fairly sure there'd be little trace after 2,000 years and certainly no trace after 20,000. Maybe nuclear waste might be detectable...
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-2, Troll. WTF? Look at the fossil record for the US. Many large mammals mysteriously vanish at about the same time humans arrive over a geologically short time period. How was my comment a troll?
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Is it any wonder that the average person has little faith in the work of particle physicists when research like this is presented in such a ridiculously exaggerated manner? This is a cool research result but it has as much to do with explaining why we are here as knowing the chemical properties of silicon tells you how to program.
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preprint. It gives a pretty good account and should be comprehensible by somone who's done even a basic QM course - ie. it uses no fancy schmancy mathematics. Mod the parent up. Or read it here: Counterfactual COmputation
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That account not inaccurrate enough to lambast the author the way you do.
Quantum entanglement is nothing more than the superposition of multiparticle states that aren't simple tensor products of the individual particle states. That's it. In fact your description is just as inaccurate as his. If two particles are entangled it doesn't mean that knowing the state of one tells you the state of the other. Things can be slightly entangled in that you might be able to glean some information about one by observing the other.
As I understand the state of the technology today, a quantum computer would have to be purposefully built to solve a single problem
Just as there is a universal classical computer we may eventually see (at least a design for) a (maybe approximately) universal quantum computer. I don't see that there is any theoretical reason whatsoever for believing that quantum computers will have to be dedicated to one particular task and I'm pretty sure there are no published papers to this effect.
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You are completely misunderstanding and need to read the original paper rather than the nature article. The strategy in the paper is not about saving energy. Quantum computers already use zero energy because they are reversible computers. The authors are not in the least bit confused about what they mean by off but it's not surprising you are confused because the Nature article is describing things in a stupid manner to be sensationalist.
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Life doesn't pause for you and let you take a breather.
I think you're missing something. Turn based games aren't slower than real time. They're super compressed. Who wants to play a game like a strategtic war game at real time? Consider WWII. Assuming you play 3 hours a day it would take 48 years to finish. And I dread to think how long it would take to play Civilisation in real time.
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The story summary on the slashdot homepage doesn't even mention the author of the book even though it twice gives the name of the reviewer. I think a little more editorial work is in order.
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FWIW I'm pretty amazed it's only 30,000 genes. What I take issue with is that we have to use the kind of silly language that people at the Santa Fe Institute use to describe what are essentially simple phenomena. Given n genes, each of which might interact with n-1 others, it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's written code that a lot of stuff might happen. The guys at the Santa Fe Institute like to take these observations and dress them up in fancy language to make them seem profound. (At least that's the impression I get from reading some of the books that have come out of there - like the work of Stuart Kauffman.)
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...this piece of code is 2 lines long and can produce more than 1000 lines of output:
for (i = 0; i<1001; ++i)
printf("%d\n",i);
and yet this code:
printf("1\n");
printf("2\n");
can only produce 2.
So why should I be astonished when one genome can do more with 30,000 genes than another genome with 100,000? Are biologists really no smarter than those managerial types that compute productivity by counting lines of code?
And am I to start using fancy schmancy language like 'emergent property' when I talk about ooh...so sophisticated coding techniques like looping and reusable subroutines?
I don't like the government meddling all that much either
What ever do you mean? Copyright is the government meddling. Without a government there would be no copyright.
artificially inflating the price of CDs
Don't you get it? A government uses force to prevent people copying information. That way it becomes a scarce resource that can be traded like any other resource. The high price of CDs (relative to do-it-yourself CD recordings) is the direct consequence of the existence of copyright laws. It is precisely what those copyright laws were implemented for - to allow providers of information to sell at an artifically price.
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Humans are linguistic animals. We have very finely tuned linguistic skills and we have the linguistic centres in the brain with at least 100,000 years of evolution behind them. As a result I'd have thought that language was one of the best ways of communicating with a machine. I certainly find it easier to learn a lexicon and grammar (ie. command line commands and how to use them) than a list of operations like "the third menu, select the second item, click on the third checkbox that comes up" and so on. In addition I find a mouse to be a hopelessly analogue tool for linguistic tasks such as programming. GUIs bear little relation to the way humans have communicated for aeons. Unfortunately eye candy sells and so we are doomed to using tools that are not adapted to human brains - GUIs
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Because unlike the Gap commercials The Matrix doesn't have 'stop-action' shots. Time is slowed down instead. This is a slightly tougher feat which I am yet to see reproduced.
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...are older than quantum computers. There are articles going back decades on how reversible computers could be made to consume arbitrarily low amounts of energy. This has nothing whatsoever to do with quantum computing (except that quantum computers are just one kind of (hard to make) reversible computer).
Slashdot already has an article on the 'shielding' method. Search for 'decoherence free subspaces'.
If Microsoft are passing over good candidates for promotion for stupid reasons then surely they punish themselves by making their own company less good than it could be.
And surely if Microsoft's practice is worse than that at other companies then those employees could find work at a company that would realise their true worth.
A constitution is not like a set of axioms in mathematics, say. In mathematics everything must follow from axioms. Law, in the legal sense, is not like that. There is much room for manoeuvre. Following the 'letter of the Constitution' does not define a unique course of action. The truly stealthy can plot a course of action through this space of possible actions to the goal they desire.
We do not elect Presidents by popular vote in the United States, we elect the President via the Electoral College.
No, but the US have shown in the last couple of months that a modern, industrial, western country can have a bloodless coup by stealth without a large part of the population even realising it.
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...by Dan Simmons then you'll know that the Catholic Church will be a major player in the future of technology in the galaxy. ISPs are nothing - just wait until they start dealing with AIs and making those cruciform things...
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Hey! You must be young 'cos you missed some good old ones: Demon Seed and The Forbin Project. Check them out on IMDB. They blow away all 4 of your suggestions as I'll hope you'll be pleased to find when you get hold of them! (As movies they're not better than 2001 but they represent AI wonderfully!)
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My internal clock counts in centuries and uses (binary) fixed point arithmetic with only two decimal places. Crap isn't it? I'm waiting to get upgraded to 16 bits.
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Slashdot Mirror
Do you think Coke cans might last 200,000,000 years? I'm fairly sure there'd be little trace after 2,000 years and certainly no trace after 20,000. Maybe nuclear waste might be detectable...
--
-2, Troll. WTF? Look at the fossil record for the US. Many large mammals mysteriously vanish at about the same time humans arrive over a geologically short time period. How was my comment a troll?
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preprint. It gives a pretty good account and should be comprehensible by somone who's done even a basic QM course - ie. it uses no fancy schmancy mathematics. Mod the parent up. Or read it here: Counterfactual COmputation
--
Quantum entanglement is nothing more than the superposition of multiparticle states that aren't simple tensor products of the individual particle states. That's it. In fact your description is just as inaccurate as his. If two particles are entangled it doesn't mean that knowing the state of one tells you the state of the other. Things can be slightly entangled in that you might be able to glean some information about one by observing the other.
----
You are completely misunderstanding and need to read the original paper rather than the nature article. The strategy in the paper is not about saving energy. Quantum computers already use zero energy because they are reversible computers. The authors are not in the least bit confused about what they mean by off but it's not surprising you are confused because the Nature article is describing things in a stupid manner to be sensationalist.
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...then why don't other animals with bones do it too?
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The story summary on the slashdot homepage doesn't even mention the author of the book even though it twice gives the name of the reviewer. I think a little more editorial work is in order.
--
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FWIW I'm pretty amazed it's only 30,000 genes. What I take issue with is that we have to use the kind of silly language that people at the Santa Fe Institute use to describe what are essentially simple phenomena. Given n genes, each of which might interact with n-1 others, it should be pretty obvious to anyone who's written code that a lot of stuff might happen. The guys at the Santa Fe Institute like to take these observations and dress them up in fancy language to make them seem profound. (At least that's the impression I get from reading some of the books that have come out of there - like the work of Stuart Kauffman.)
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printf("%d\n",i); and yet this code: printf("1\n");
printf("2\n"); can only produce 2. So why should I be astonished when one genome can do more with 30,000 genes than another genome with 100,000? Are biologists really no smarter than those managerial types that compute productivity by counting lines of code?
And am I to start using fancy schmancy language like 'emergent property' when I talk about ooh...so sophisticated coding techniques like looping and reusable subroutines?
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...parents should be charged a tax on every one with a penis to offset the cost of compensating rape victims.
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Humans are linguistic animals. We have very finely tuned linguistic skills and we have the linguistic centres in the brain with at least 100,000 years of evolution behind them. As a result I'd have thought that language was one of the best ways of communicating with a machine. I certainly find it easier to learn a lexicon and grammar (ie. command line commands and how to use them) than a list of operations like "the third menu, select the second item, click on the third checkbox that comes up" and so on. In addition I find a mouse to be a hopelessly analogue tool for linguistic tasks such as programming. GUIs bear little relation to the way humans have communicated for aeons. Unfortunately eye candy sells and so we are doomed to using tools that are not adapted to human brains - GUIs
--
Because unlike the Gap commercials The Matrix doesn't have 'stop-action' shots. Time is slowed down instead. This is a slightly tougher feat which I am yet to see reproduced.
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Slashdot already has an article on the 'shielding' method. Search for 'decoherence free subspaces'.
--And surely if Microsoft's practice is worse than that at other companies then those employees could find work at a company that would realise their true worth.
----
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...by Dan Simmons then you'll know that the Catholic Church will be a major player in the future of technology in the galaxy. ISPs are nothing - just wait until they start dealing with AIs and making those cruciform things...
--
Hey! You must be young 'cos you missed some good old ones: Demon Seed and The Forbin Project. Check them out on IMDB. They blow away all 4 of your suggestions as I'll hope you'll be pleased to find when you get hold of them! (As movies they're not better than 2001 but they represent AI wonderfully!)
--
My internal clock counts in centuries and uses (binary) fixed point arithmetic with only two decimal places. Crap isn't it? I'm waiting to get upgraded to 16 bits.
--