Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
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Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
I'm surprised that a mint copy of the original was so hard to find. I would have thought all kinds of schools as well as tech companies would keep collections of historical industry mags like "Electronics".
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Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
A co-worker of mine has a photocopy of a page from a magazine article about the first transistor made in Bell Labs in 1947.
Here's the same picture alongside a photo of the inventors: http://www.rpi.edu/~schubert/Educati...ansistor-3.jpg |
Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
Where's JoeP? New South Wales has made a single atom transistor. I heard an interview with one of the researchers on NPR, and this may be scalable. She said that only a few hundred of these transistors would be needed for computing, but I'm not sure why that would be.
Physicists create working transistor consisting of a single atom Quote:
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Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
So it will get us porn that much faster?
--J.D. |
Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
Porn has been a driving force not in technological advancement per se, but in consumer adoption of technological advances.
Back in the day, mostly only perverts owned their own projectors, then their own VCRs; and in early Usenet, the binary newsgroups were largely porn (there was a very misleading and very widely quoted study at the time that conflated bandwidth vs. content to create the impression that the internet was like 95% porn or something, in fact), and really, porn has always been a major factor in increasing consumer demand for faster download speeds and greater storage capacity. Check you out, Doctor X, accidentally touching on a salient point! |
Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
What if the new transistor just makes porn smaller instead of faster? :eek:
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Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
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But it is never by "accident." --J.D. |
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--J.D. |
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Last I heard (late last year) they had this one quantum computer factor the number 15. Big whoop, right? I can do that in my head. But seriously, factoring numbers is a very hard problem for traditional computers to do, but it has cool applications in spying and war-making, so the nerds make their prototypes do it as a parlor trick to get governments to throw money at them and it is very effective. :spend: So with quantum computing, you have this black box (I'm a computer scientist, not a physicist, so I get to believe in magic and let them do the work, but I assume this is where the quantum parallelism and exponential speed-up happens) where I give it my problem, and it gives me an answer in polynomial time, but there's a possibility it won't be right. But suppose I know it has a 10% chance of being right. I just run my program 10 times and check each answer. That still takes loads less time than solving the problem straight out. That's as much as I can remember from a 3-hour workshop I took last year. I'm taking the full course this fall, so hopefully I'll be more useful after that. |
Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
Anyway, also, here's another piece from today:
IBM makes significant breakthrough towards scalable quantum computers This might come closer to answering your question than anything I said: Quote:
Actually, wait. Now that I think about it, I have a vague idea. Stand by. So you have these qubits and they are "entangled" with each other. The presentation I saw was on the CS theory of it, not the physics, so I don't know how exactly it relates to quantum entanglement, but I imagine they used the same word because the one has something to do with the other. Anyway, these qubits are represented as nodes on a graph (hypercube, IIRC), and they are entangled if they share an edge. And the state of one qubit depends on the states of all the others it's adjacent to. And then there's a lot of math, like what happens to the whole graph if this one node changes state? So I guess you can represent a whole lot of information that way, a lot more than just 2^n (or 3^n if you're counting superposition as a state). |
Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
It's a bit like the double-slit experiment where you fire one particle through the slits. The probability of where it lands implies that it has to 'sniff out' both possible routes through the slits - though it can only actually pass through one of them. This can be extended to 3, 4, ... n slits - the single particle has to somehow 'traverse' all the possible routes so that it knows the probabilities that it will land at all the different places on the screen (or detector). It can only traverse one route, classically, but it behaves as though it's aware of all the other possibilities.
This doesn't make any sense from a classical point of view. One way of understanding what happens is to imagine that there are lots of different parallel universes and that in each universe the particle takes a different route. The final position where the particle lands in our universe then implies that it somehow has knowledge (up until we measure where it is) of what is going on with its brother particles in all the other universes. The quantum computer uses the same idea - we encode the problem in one or more quantum bits - these bits could be, for example, the polarization or spin of some particles. Then the particles do their weird quantum stuff inside the computer, and when we measure the result we see what happened to them. The fact that the quantum computer is many times faster than a classical one can then be explained by the many copies of the quantum computer existing in all the parallel universes. Say there are 1000 parallel universes - that's like having 1000 classical computers all working together on the same problem at the same time. |
Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
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--J.D. |
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:doh: You're right, of course. That was sloppy of me.
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Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!
But then . . . that would burn . . .
. . . wait for it . . . --J. "Yeah, Let's Get Some Sushi and Not Pay!" D. |
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