Physicist proposes a new type of computing at SXSW. Check out orbital computing by Stacey Higginbotham.
From the post:
The demand for computing power is constantly rising, but we’re heading to the edge of the cliff in terms of increasing performance — both in terms of the physics of cramming more transistors on a chip and in terms of the power consumption. We’ve covered plenty of different ways that researchers are trying to continue advancing Moore’s Law — this idea that the number of transistors (and thus the performance) on a chip doubles every 18 months — especially the far out there efforts that take traditional computer science and electronics and dump them in favor of using magnetic spin, quantum states or probabilistic logic.
We’re going to add a new impossible that might become possible to that list thanks to Joshua Turner, a physicist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, who has proposed using the orbits of electrons around the nucleus of an atom as a new means to generate the binary states (the charge or lack of a charge that transistors use today to generate zeros and ones) we use in computing. He calls this idea orbital computing and the big takeaway for engineers is that one can switch the state of an electron’s orbit 10,000 times faster than you can switch the state of a transistor used in computing today.
That means you can still have the features of computing in that you use binary programming, but you just can compute more in less time. To get us to his grand theory, Turner had to take the SXSW audience through how computing works, how transistors work, the structure of atoms, the behavior of subatomic particles and a bunch of background on X-rays.
This would have been a presentation to see: Bits, Bittier Bits & Qubits: Physics of Computing
Try this SLAC Search for some publications by Joshua Turner.
It’s always fun to read about how computers will be able to process data more quickly. A techie sort of thing.
On the other hand, going 10,000 times faster with semantically heterogeneous data, will get you to the wrong answer 10,000 times faster.
If you realize the answer is wrong, you may have time to try again.
What if you don’t realize the answer is wrong?
Do you really want to be the customs agent who stops a five year old because their name is similar to that of a known terrorist? Because the machine said they could not fly?
Excited about going faster, worried about data going by too fast for anyone to question its semantics.