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Technology

TeraHertz Molecular Switch Arrays 71

Posted by jimjag from the only-politicians-switch-faster dept.
Bfaber wrote in about researchers at the University of Illinois having come up with a method to produce atomic-scale TeraHertz switches. It's possible that when attached to specifically designed molecules, these puppies would act like transistors that can switch at 100 trillion times a second. Kind of throws MHz right out the window, don't it?
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TeraHertz Molecular Switch Arrays More

TeraHertz Molecular Switch Arrays

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  • Obligatory Beowulf Post (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I wonder what a Beowulf cluster of 100THz computers could do?

  • Re:If you're Bill Joy, Clap Your Hands! (Score:5)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @05:17AM (#1139697)
    >>>100 Thz! And at molecular scales. I think we'd legitimately be able to recreate all of the brain's neural connections and interactions with technology like this. I'd like to rebut that statement with a simple thought problem. Please don't take offense this is just my opinion:

    Raw speed does not magic make. Imagine if AMD dropped a few thousand gigahertz Athlons on the homebrew computer club back in the pre-Altair days. Do you think those hobbyists (or damn near anyone for that matter) could have created an OS with anything like the complexity of FreeBSD? No of course not. They still would have had to climb the learning curve, building information as they went.

    I'm not saying Thz won't help us eventually reach brain-type computing; what I AM saying is that an ultrafast microprocessor is not going to result a priori in a "thinking machine"...

    Recall that the magic of the human brain is not a single blinding fast unit; rather it is by _MAsSiVe_PaRrAlLeLiSm_ that we believe our brains do all that info-crunching.

    In other words I'm saying that when we finally DO create a silicon 'brain', I'll bet blood that the researchers turn around and say "If we only knew lemmas X, Y and Z in 1987 then we could have built this thing with 68000's." It's not the raw horsepower that counts, its the COMPLEXITY and ORDERING of that horsepower.

    IMHO.

    mu!

  • Moore's law is only good for a limited set of 2-D devices. If you look at other technological advances, you can see other things that are actually exceeding Moore's at this point. Fiber optic transmission speeds, for example, which are doubling a LOT faster than that...
  • I got a couple of pounds of this stuff, hooked up a microphone, a camera, and a speaker, and turned it on.

    It wants to watch pro wrestling...

  • When you go to school here and you hear about cool stuff like this on Slashdot before any source on campus.
  • It doesn't matter how fast it can switch - you're still limited by the speed of light. As most computing today still works serially this means that you *still* need to wait while the data threads it's way through your "terahertz transistors" and then get stored back out on the memory.

    The CPU is only as fast as it's slowest link: namely, it's been the memory lately. Now, if somebody can design memory that can charge/discharge a few trillion times a second THEN we'll be on to something! =) I'll give 'ya a hint: optics and magnets.

  • 'Course the other question is, how well will it handle overclocking?

  • The fathers of the field had been pretty confusing: John von Neumann speculated about computers and the human brain in analogies sufficiently wild to be worthy of a medieval thinker, and Alan Turing thought about criteria to settle the question of whether machines can think, a question of which we now know that it is about as relevant as the question of whether submarines can swim.

    Professor Edsger Dijkstra at the ACN South Central Regional Conference Austin, Texas, 16 to 18 Novemver 1984 /blockquote
  • Geek invention of the week. Yawn.
    Very few make it commercially.
    Silicon still has 20 years.
  • By 2005 Windows bloatware will require a
    peta-hertz computer :-(

  • Silicon is forever (Score:3)

    by Bearpaw ( 13080 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @07:53AM (#1139706)
    Silicon still has 20 years

    Silicon is forever. I mean, who would want to hang out with babes on beaches made of anything else?

  • Re:If you're Bill Joy, Clap Your Hands! (Score:3)

    by orpheus ( 14534 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @08:17AM (#1139707)

    I'm not saying Thz won't help us eventually reach brain-type computing; what I AM saying is that an ultrafast microprocessor is not going to result a priori in a "thinking machine"...

    Recall that the magic of the human brain is not a single blinding fast unit; rather it is by _MAsSiVe_PaRrAlLeLiSm_ that we believe our brains do all that info-crunching.

    I agree that the human brain is not a blindlingly fast sequential processing unit, but I think there are several 'secrets' that are often overlooked in 'human brain as thinking machine'

    1) We define the problem and the successful outputs. In other words, we humans may be terminally screwed up in how we perceive and analyze our environment or computational problems, but we will *not* accept a machine as "thinking" until it is approximately as screwed up, and in the same peculiar ways as we are.

    2) We have highly specialized circuitry for most subtasks like vision, memory, verbal and nonverbal language(nuance, inflection)... we don't even understand what all the tasks are yet. This is not massively parallel processing, it's more like my kitchen (which can toast bread in the toaster, make coffee in the percolator, cook eggs on the stove, preserve food in the 'fridge, and warm a danish in the microwave, clean last nights dishes in the diswasher, and dispense me a glass of water at the same time).

    3) While these circuits are complex and specialized, evolution doesn't (strictly speaking) optimize anything by any objective standard. you may argue that we 'out-competed' some other species (say neanderthals), but the very task at which we 'outcompeted' them is undefined. it might be something as trivial as being less susceptible to the Great Mastodon Flu of 50,000BC or having a slick print shop who let us get our IPO brochures out faster.

    4) this brings us back to #1: we don't recognize anything as thinking that doesn't closely match our own screwed up thinking. Once upon a time, doing math was enough - but they beat us blotto at that. Then it was chess. Similarly blotto. Then it was conversation (the turing test), which *guess what* means simulating us.

    Soon "thinking" will mean the ability to surf pr0n with your left hand, while flaming M$ with your right (without wondering, as a sensible Flesh-o-matic 2020 might, why you were flaming M$ instead of.. never mind)

    __________

  • Correction: 10 femtosecond (comp w/ state of art) (Score:4)

    by orpheus ( 14534 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @07:10AM (#1139708)
    The article stated "switching arrays running at 100 terahertz", but as many of you seem to have grasped intuitively, this is actually misleading or inaccurate.

    For the record, as far as I can tell, after a little background surfing, and some BOTE calculations (similar calulations were often 'background exercises' for the student of molecular biology ) it appears they are talking about:

    10 femtosecond (e-14) switching times NOT an operating speed of 100 terahertz (e14) The term "femtosecond switching" will allow you to more accurately find existing work in the field. Switching in sub-10 femtosecond range has been around for years, at this same 'bench theory' level of investigation.

    This is a very interesting piece of work, but hardly a breakthrough when 2 femtosecond capacitor switching was announced in 1997 (I had my doubts then, but didn't check it out) and 2-5 femtosecond laser optical switching has probably been around even longer

    You can immediately deduct 1+ order of magnitude from the risetime to get a practical operating speed (you want digital square waves, not sawtooths, right?) even when this switching speed becomes a practical reality.

    You can also deduct a few orders of magnitude from the operating speed of a single switch to the operating speed of a CPU or RAM. Think about how many sequential transistor operations there are in a single RAM bit (on-chip, on-card, and system transistors)

    And now, as a public service to those of you who need a refresher (we'll all need these terms soon enough)



    Exp:
    -12 pico- # Spanish pico, "a bit"
    +12 tera- # Greek teras, "monster"

    -15 femto- # Danish-Norweg. femten, "fifteen"
    +15 peta- # Greek pente, "five"

    -18 atto- # Danish-Norweg. atten, "eighteen"
    +18 exa- # Greek hex, "six"

    -21 zopto- # Latin septem, "seven"
    +21 zetta- # Latin septem, "seven"

    -24 yocto- # Greek or Latin octo, "eight"
    +24 otta- # Greek or Latin octo, "eight"

    __________

  • Sounds like just the thing to use for the CPU of a nanobot :-)
    And, more seriously (?), I think that practical considerations may keep this unuseable until nanobots are practical.
    OTOH, I'm not willing to guess what THAT timeframe is. (Well, ok, 5-30 years.)

    The thing about rapid change, is that it makes it difficult to keep up with the present.
  • Umm... Moore's Law states that the amount of data storage that a microchip can hold doubles once every 18 months. (Thanks WhatIs [whatis.com]!)

    Normally that refers to speed increases when you are talking about similar technology (ie. increasing the number of transistors on a chip) but this is a totally new concept. Removing individual hydrogen atoms from a monatomic surface layer to create a rotating potential well is far different from laying metallic transistors on silicon.

    Eric

  • 100 THz is 10^14 per second... the period is then 10^-14 sec, or .01 picoseconds (10 femtoseconds). Light can go about 3 microns in that time, which is a large number of hydrogen-atom-radii (being about 10^-4 microns).

    One of the things they are doing is running two nearly-parallel lines together to see the minimum allowed spacing between holes before the two lines are indistinguishable. I bet they can get closer than 1000 atomic radii at which point I wouldn't worry too much about it.

    Eric

  • Re:How do they measure the speed? (Score:3)

    by EricWright ( 16803 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @05:09AM (#1139712) Journal
    I think the question is 'How are such rotational frequencies measured?', not 'how do they get such frequencies in the first place'.

    After reading the article, I'm not sure if they actually measured such frequencies, or just presented theoretical calculations (it's mostly a basic quantum mechanics problem involving hemispherical potential wells ... hydrogen's energy spectrum is WELL known).

    Eric
  • Everyone thinks of breaking the speed barrier... but imagine the implications on security. With such a speed jump, would bumping up the encryption key size from in the thousands to something higher, be suffice? A more complex algorithm may be needed.

    What about packet sniffing? Imagine it, now the common computer wouldn't ever need to drop packets while sniffing a nic.

    ---

  • Some other guy had an "effect" that limited transmission rates to 33.6 over standard phone lines.

    Are you talking about Shannon's theorem? I wouldn't exactly place that in the same category as Moore's Law. Incidentally, Shannon's Theorem is NOT violated by > 33.6 kbps modems.
  • true asynch subsystems don't *have* clock speeds 8^D

    Of course... if your communication to the other areas could be clocked, if that's what you mean...
  • Everyone thinks of breaking the speed barrier... but imagine the implications on security. With such a speed jump, would bumping up the encryption key size from in the thousands to something higher, be suffice? A more complex algorithm may be needed.

    Barring some fundamental breakthrough in mathematics or in quantum-parallel computing, the difficulty of cracking a key increases exponentially with the key size (i.e. it doubles for each N additional bits) while the difficulty of using the key increases only as a polynomial function (i.e. it increases in proportion to the percentage increase in key size). Thus, adding a few dozen bits to routine key sizes each time calculation speed doubles keeps you ahead of the curve without bogging down your communications.

    Fundamental mathematical breakthroughs are unpredictable -- and in this case, the fundamental breakthrough may turn out to be a proof that there is no easy solution to certain problems on which public-key cryptosystems have been built. As for quantum computing, I'll believe it when I see it; my hunch is that setting up a system of a few dozen qbits so that it will collapse into the solution to a given problem (rather than something else) is going to be as intractable as the original problem was in the first place.
    /.

  • IMHO, shouldn't this be under "Science" not "Hardware"?
  • these puppies would act like transistors that can switch at 100 trillion times a second

    Them's some fast puppies. A lot faster than my sister's new Labrador retriever puppy. He doesn't even know how to sit, much less act like a transistor. But I bet that, accelerated to 100THz, he could go through some serious shoes...

    --

  • "By attaching arrays of spinning organic molecules to the surface of a standard silicon wafer"

    Organic..Does this mean we will have "cyborg" computers? This could give "cyber porn" a whole new meaning in a few years.....

  • This sort of announcement brings home to me just how quickly technology is developing. 10^14 switches per second is so far beyond what we previously thought to be attainable... I guess there is "plenty of room at the bottom" for technological improvement - this is going to be a very interesting century.

    Technological singularity, anyone?

  • Re:speedy.. (Score:3)

    by Colm@TCD ( 61960 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @05:15AM (#1139721) Homepage
    100THz corresponds to 10^-14 seconds (10 femtoseconds). Light can travel approximately 3um (3 millionths of a metre, or a little more than one ten-thousandth of an inch) in that time. While 'nanotech' will make some Very Small Systems Indeed, I'd say it's more likely that we'll see asynchronous subsystems within the computing devices of the next few decades, running at very high clock speeds, and communicating with each other over comparatively high-latency links (you know, down in the picosecond range... :)
  • These questions that should be asked are even more basic then these: it isn't even a "memory" yet!

    What they have shown is that, using an very small scanning tunneling microscope tip, and a carefully prepared silcon surface, they can "write" lines and then have organic molecules end up on those lines.

    Then, the particular organic molecules they attach "spin" in this environment.

    This is NOT "just theory," i.e., they actually did this in a real machine. It IS "just theory" if you compare it to actually making a memory chip.

    Did they do anything like attach wires to these molecules? No. Do they have a particularly large number of these molecules? They don't say. But the STM probably has only one tip which is plucking one hydrogen atom at a time. So, probably not.

    "Pure silicon" is not the problem. Why? Because all the chip companies in the world use pure silicon wafers. The problem is making even a one-bit MEMORY that can actually be operated reliably for a long time, before your organic molecule gets fried or stuck. Then, put 16 million of these bit elements on a chip, with the circuitry to connect them all, in the meantime, they still have to keep working fast. And try to write all 16 million little lines all at the same time, so you can actually build a useful number in the lifetime of your customers.

    Remember that any old DRAM fab in Korea can churn out however-many-megabits chips on a few hundred chips at once, in however-many-dozen fabrication stations, that have all the wires connecting the bits together, then test, wire, and seal those chips into the little plastic packages that can be mounted on SIMMs/DIMMs that you can stick in your PC and run at 100 MHz. I.e. these things WORK.

    This won't get "buried by marketing" if this technology can do the same thing cheaper. Making computer chips is like "printing money." If you can print $10 bills instead of $1 bills, you do it.

    For a more down-to-earth look at what this lab actually does, check

    http://www.beckman.uiuc.edu/researc h/stm.html#1 [uiuc.edu]

  • I don't even remember enough metric prefixes to talk about this. Is 100 terahertz a .1 pico-second, or a 100 ... ato-(?)second period? Neither electricity nor light can go very far in that much time..(.1 mils or so (1 mil = 1/1000 inch)) which suggests that if this technology takes hold, it how close you can stick stuff will pretty directly affect how fast the whole system can be.
  • You're thinking of endohedral complexes....they've been around for years.
    What they're talking about doing is depassivating a silicon surface one atom at a time. The "hole" referred to in the article is not the "hole" which serves as a carrier particle in semiconductor theory, but what chemists call a "dangling bond" or "free radical." This is extremely reactive, and tends to react with any nearby molecules containing double or triple bonds.
  • Just to respond to a LOT of posts out there, this would require a wavelength of .1 mm. Assuming they scale up the number of transistors in a chip to keep the die size the same, this means within the CPU itself some parts would lag by at least a dozen cycles.
    With the lack of info about the specific molecules used as switches, I'd guess we're looking at a feature size of 1-10nm, which lies roughly at .005-.05 the size of modern IC features.
    Since the wavelength is 10^5 nm, this means we could fit 10^8-10^10 devices on a chip assuming we left no space at all between devices. Considerably more than a modern CPU, so we could conceivably integrate all the system memory onto the same chip
  • I am not a biologist.

    I think that there is a difference between organic and biologial (as in biotech.)

    There is a world of difference between a buckyball and a plant or animal cell. (Self replecation comes to mind.)

    -Peter
  • I wish that the paperclip didn't have to be installed. I wasn't able to even access the help for a while after I first installed (I told it not to install the !#%!*%! answer wizard / agent / bastard / whatever they're calling it now). It kept coming up with some stupid error when I asked for help though.

    One time it spit up the error though, it told me I had to install the paperclip bastard to get help on VBA for Access or something like that.. so I let it install it, and now I can read help.

    I've found that ever since '95, Microsoft products work better if you just install them with all options as often as possible (we originally reinstalled Win95 monthly to keep it reasonably fast and stable).

  • Wow! (Score:3)

    by ggruschow ( 78300 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @05:13AM (#1139728)
    Let me know when these things go into commercial production! With that amount of processing power, I could run MS Office 2000 in realtime!.

    The dang thing eats > 99% of my PIII CPU doing paperclip animations and futzing with those summarized/unsummarized menus. I'm running NT because my development environment crashes so often that running a ms-dos-based environment (Win98) just wouldn't cut it.

  • I find things like ftp or java sessions running inside an MS-DOS window in Window$ 98 run a *lot* faster if you twirl the mouse cursor around real fast in circles over the Dos Window..
  • I'm guessing rotation could be measured with a radio, maybe some doppler thing (heck Arecibo is listening at 1 Ghz).

    Terahertz is molecular rotation range, but also microwave frequency.. If you hang an organometallic functional group off the side, or just do anything electrical at that rate, wouldn't this become a little microwave broadcasting station? Not sure I want to use a computer with a microwave bus without my lead-lined undershorts and sweatband. Or might spinning structure in a magnetic field act like an antenna and charge up the substrate with static charge..

    (spectrum cf. <a href=http://www.scimedia.com/chem-ed/light/em-spec .htm>scimedia's encyclopedia</a>)
  • Sorry, they've just done this so many times. All /. article posters, in the metric system, don't capitalize the damn unit.

    Where is my mind?
    mfspr r3, pc / lvxl v0, 0, r3 / li r0, 16 / stvxl v0, r3, r0
  • So I guess I will be a bit reluctant towards its success until I see it on the commercial ads of AMD or Intel.

    I would expect it to actually work about 6 months after those commercials. =]

  • For some time now we have been hearing about how the "end of the CPU" is in sight - how we will reach the barrier at which quantum effects will prevent any further reductions in chip size, and that this will essentially halt all further CPU enhancements.

    But if you look at the technical literature it is full of examples like this of ingenious new processes which overcome this so-called "barrier" and will allow us to push CPUs into ever faster realms. Like this one, they will take some time to make it into practical use, but once the initial breakthrough, the idea, is made and successfully tried, then it is only ever a matter of time before a working product is produced.

    Personally I think all these people who harp on about the end of technology are unwilling to accept that innovation will always proceed, and that you should never fully base your predictions of future technology on the technology today. All it takes is one good idea for a whole new branch of technology to open.

  • I'm not much of a chemist, but I saw a documentory once about scientific research on getting some atom/molecule into the bucky, does this article actually tell me that they finally did this?

  • It doesn't matter how fast it can switch - you're still limited by the speed of light.

    This reminds me of a story my dad used to tell me about seeing Dr. Wang speak in the seventies. He said, "There are two things which limit the speed of computers, the speed of light, and the distance light hast to travel. We have decided to work on the latter first."

    "186,000 miles per second. It's not just a good idea, ITS THE LAW!" -from a bumber sticker
  • I like it. Pretty soon, we can have processors sooooo fast, they give us results BEFORE we enter our queries. I like the idea of a CPU exploring all possible logic paths at branches in code and then simply displaying that particular result sequence when the user (or real-time controller) asks for it.

    Sorta the TARDIS Express of the computer world. "When you positively, absolutely MUST have your packet there BEFORE you sent it."
  • Yes, but I have to wonder just how much of this technology is even possible. The article didn't really say that any of it had been done, it just said things like "If this technology takes hold ..." and "We're working with chemists now who are designing molecules that when attached will act like transistors that can switch at 100 trillion times a second."

    If press-releases are sent out before the article is seen in a recognized journal, I have to wonder about the feasibility of it all.

    Although it would be nice to have memory that has to wait for my processor, I don't think I'm going to hold my breath for this.

  • Kind of throws MHZ out the window, don't it?

    Not quite.

    Right now, these guys would not even be able to get a simple adder working with this tech. It seems that the way they are making these test switches is slow as hell and about as far from mass production as anything. They don't even know what molecule to use as the switch. I'd guess that the ole IC's are safe for at least a decade (that's several generations in computer time!).

    But then, when I get some of those THZ CPU's and make a Beowulf cluster... :)

  • I know Moore's Law says a doubling of everything every 18 months. But this isn't doubling.

    Seriously, this will be a nice boon in 5 years or so when they can build more than just one component at this speed - I'd like a terahertz bus, please.

    Wow. Just imagine Unreal running on a machine this fast. Yay, VR.
    Information wants to be free

  • We'll have to wait (Score:3)

    by aav ( 117550 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @05:06AM (#1139740)
    I guess the post here it way too enthusiastic, since even in the original article they never mentioned some basic facts.
    Read it well : it's only theory.
    And there are a few questions to be asked :
    What about the stability of the memory ? What are the operating conditions ? If it has to be kept below, say 200K it will be quite difficult to use it, wouldn't it ?
    What would be the needs for producing such a memory ? Because it's quite hard to find pure silicon in nature (and producing itis quite expensive I imagine)
    And last but not least : how about compatibility with the actual technology ? I guess none of you is actually imagining that this will be joyfully embraced by companies that are strong on the memory/processors market.
    This may actually end up being buried by marketing, because nowadays an university doesn't really have the possibility (financially) of designing a competitive chip/architecture.
    So I guess I will be a bit reluctant towards its success until I see it on the commercial ads of AMD or Intel.
  • about time you upgraded from that packard bell p150...

  • "Thz" switches sound great and all, but what about the rest of the hardware. Motherboard busses are still realtively nothing in comparison, Harddisk transer rates still kinda blow (for IDE anyway), and lets just not talk about the advances in floppy drives over the past, I dunno, 12 years. Yes Zipdrives and such are nice, but aside from CDROM and 3.5 Floppy, theres not anyother real standard.

    rant on

    Give us a machine utilizing what we've been "told" technology can do (at a resonable price) then put this on the market. I want my Optical data storage (from a roll of scotch tape) or better, my 1ghz network transfer speeds, and wtf ever that keeps making the news that we never see

    /rant
  • The future does not look too bright for the redmond hill folks. The scientists figured out a way to speed up the processors to 100 Teraherz, however, as announced by the Micro$oft representatives this will not be nearly enough speed to run yet another version of Windows (code name "PaceMaker" or sparky)

    The advancements in storage devices are even more depressing, it probably will be possible to put 10,000 Gigabits on a sugar cube sized device [geocities.com] but the estimated storage that will be needed by "PaceMaker" is in 3 orders of magnitude away from that number.

    It's the control panel, stupid!

  • I wonder what a Beowulf cluster of 100THz computers could do?

    The answer is..... "Anything it wants."

    -- WhiskeyJack

  • ok. I have no particular bone to pick with MS word. See, what I don't understand is why you go ahead and install the animated helper ( you could have deselected it during install ) and then complain about it taking up resources. Why install something you don't want?
    I know that you may have been joking, but I am addressing the general attitude that most people here carry towards MS. Word kicks WordPerfect out the wazoo in terms of ease of use and capabilities. this is not a flame or troll. I am just tired of people complaining about the presence of things which they are responsible for installing in the first place.
  • if windows crashes 1 time every 30 minutes... that's 1 time every 1800 seconds...say you crank up the speed by ... about 1000... that means that windows crashes every 1.8 seconds... then again it would only take a few seconds to reboot that sucker ;-)

  • Moore's Law? (Score:3)

    by coolgeek ( 140561 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @05:00AM (#1139747) Homepage
    I knew it! Moore's law would not spell the end of the microprocessor as we know it. Some other guy had an "effect" that limited transmission rates to 33.6 over standard phone lines.

    Reminds me of that high school teach of mine. One day, he was telling me about his 1K RAM card he got for his Altair. Came with 1-256 byte chip. He told me (as we were installing the 48K RAM card) that he thought if he ever fully populated that 1K card, he would have more RAM than he would know what to do with.

    Seems that most "barriers" in the computer industry are not real; they are merely perceived.

  • Not to throw too much cold water on folks eagerly counting their teraherz, but I do note from the article that producing the chip involves using a scanning tunnelling electron microscope to knock hydrogen atoms one by one off a passivated substrate. Makes direct-write electron beam seem pretty straightforward. And even when they do produce the chip, I also note that all they do is attach the molecules; there's no switching or logic being done yet. Again, a simple matter of a little more development. Like, maybe, 20 years?
  • You just put in a good bit of bloat yourself. Pull the stick out of your butt and lighten up a little. Where's your sense of humor? This is a forum with threads so that we can go off on our rabbit trails without disturbing other threads. If you see something you don't like, quietly skip over it.

  • WOW (Score:1)

    by ivan37 ( 149147 )
    Heck...I guess Ill just have to add this to my wishlist along with those 500 Gigabit/inch disks...but, as said in that discussion: When can _I_ get it? Its nice to know the IT industry is still on its toes looking at new ideas, but until I can buy this 9 billion Mhz computer, I frankly don't care.
  • Ah, but you dont collapse into the answer, you collapse into a type of answer that has a global property, hence massively reducing your workload. (i.e. if you know your looking for an encrypted string of words, you would look for some property that indicated words, and you can hone it ever more specifically so that you look for something resembling English rather than 'asdgskljhflash'
  • (Key size)/(Crack time) is an exponential curve. In other words, increase computer speed by ten thousand and all you need to do is add a handful more bits.

  • THZ? (Score:1)

    by fabjep ( 154553 )
    Interestingly, other than a single comment about the possibility of THZ RAM (which is undeniably impressive) the article did not even allude to 100thz CPUs. We can make a single transistor switch pretty damned fast now (though not 100thz), but that doesn't mean we can make an entire ALU go even close to that fast, much less the associated control systems and bus transfer which would be necessary to utilize such technology. Regardless, I'm sure this technology has a lot of potential. The article seems to have been largely misinterpreted.
  • Destroy itself by bettering itself? I'm not so sure about that. Certainly we are evolving on a technological scale much faster than our biology can adapt. In other words, we our modifying our evironement to something for which we are not sufficiently adapted. Symptoms of this are everywhere: crime, obesity, etc. Our aspirations to "civilization" are, for a large part, in direct contradiction with our evolution. Like everything, we will find balance. Whether or not that balance will be acheived by our elimination from the planet is not yet clear yet (I don't think, hopefully no one else should either). It is possible that we can technologically overextend ourselves almost endlessly. And, if not, we may find a healthy balance before we reach a breaking point. I doubt life is quite as boolean as people make it out to be.
  • 1) We define the problem and the successful outputs. In other words, we humans may be terminally screwed up in how we perceive and analyze our environment or computational problems, but we will *not* accept a machine as "thinking" until it is approximately as screwed up, and in the same peculiar ways as we are.


    Someone famous said intelligence was (something like) "patterned behaviour which we can't explain" didn't they? At least this account allows a little leeway for a creature to be intelligent without following our (possibly screwed up) patterns. Of course, it still has to be sufficiently familiar that we recognise it as a pattern...

  • As soon as we start messing with our SELF instead of adding on, we have crossed the line into oblivion. There will be no turning back from that one.

    You should bury this post in the backyard. In forty years your grandkids (or "the young generation" if you don't have 'em yourself) will probably have the same reaction to this, as most young people do today to the idea that "credit cards are too dangerous to use... the only real money is cash in the hand".

    (Note: I'm not saying they're wrong about the money...)

  • Gibson thought of this 10? years ago. He called them MICROSOFTS
  • if we could make computers on the molecular scale, wouldn't we by definition be able to recreate the brain's complexity? Isn't that how the brain is made, using quantum computing nanomachines? yeah yeah, different type of design. sure.
  • It wont be long now until we see a new line of organic products - Maybe our children's children will have computer chips in their heads. Scary, huh?
  • Well, with technology like this, I have no doubt the predictions of Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil will become true! 100 Thz! And at molecular scales. I think we'd legitimately be able to recreate all of the brain's neural connections and interactions with technology like this.

    Check out IDMAweb [idmaweb.com] for the latest privacy and security news.

  • To turn your argument around, if a computer club in the pre-altair days knew how to write a FreeBSD system, do you think the hardware could have supported it? Well, I don't think with today's hardware we could ever recreate the human brain. With technology like this, we could, however! Finding out how to 'program' the brain will come (who knows when). Having the hardware to do it is now no longer an obstacle (assuming this technology comes of age).
  • Hardware gets faster slower than software gets slower. (Niklaus Wirth)

  • The Moore conspiracy (Score:3)

    by MrShiny ( 171918 ) on Tuesday April 11, 2000 @07:18AM (#1139763) Homepage
    So I keep reading all these headlines about quantum leap hardware technologies - 1THz CPU, 400Gbit/sq inch persistent memory, 100 GB/s fiber optics. I know it's naive to ask why I can't go out and buy these things now.. it takes years or decades to get from the lab to the shelf.

    But does anyone find it strange that Moore's law is so consistently true? Why does computer hardware advance at such a steady rate? What exactly is Intel doing in their lab that allows them to make a 1GHz chip now but not a month ago? And what will allow them to make it at half the price 18 months from now? When was the last time somebody took advantage of a discovery like this?

    Could it be a conspiracy to keep the power of hardware and the requirements of software in sync? If Intel did come out with a 1THz chip right now, everybody would run out and buy one and then nobody would need another chip for years. I smell a conspiracy.

  • IMHO quantum processes are occational by their nature. That device should be either innacurate or exessively redundant. It may be great for neuro-computing, where single errors are not fatal, but with traditional architecture - don't know, i'd rather not...
  • There is one very solid problem with that concept. It's not just scary, it's REAL.

    The human race is totally dead set on destroying itself by bettering itself. There is of course a very fat line that needs to be drawn between reasonable usage of biotech chip systems (which will exist, we all know this to be true) for day to day life, and biotech chips just because you can.

    In other words, maybe a busy business exec would want to have a cellular phone as part of his head, that directly interfaced with his neural net, so that he could "silently" have a conversation with someone over the phone, while maintaining a verbal conversation simultaneously. Now that would be cool. But there are many pointless (and potentially dangerous) and stupid things that could be done with it, such as augmenting brain patterns or something. As soon as we start messing with our SELF instead of adding on, we have crossed the line into oblivion. There will be no turning back from that one.

    Notice i got through this whole thing without saying "borg" once.
  • this is an article about the technology of switching and is not related to any one operating system. First of all the technology is theoretical and know one really knows how memmory, bus speeds, chip sets, and other hardware will react to switching at these speeds. Software will also have issues, however why must this turn into a forum of windows bashing? Everyone knows, yes it is a horrible put together peice of software, that there is better. However stick to the subject of switching and dont bloat responces with crap like this

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