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Underground > Laboratory >

Frozen Light and Quantum Computing.

17:29 / 14.01.02

quote:Researchers in the United States and Korea have brought light to a complete standstill in a crystal. The pulse is effectively held within the solid, ready to be released at a later stage.

This trick could be used to store information in a quantum computer1.

Normal computers store information in simple binary form (1's and 0's) in electronic and magnetic devices. Stationary light pulses can encode information in more sophisticated ways that use the laws of quantum mechanics, making information processing more powerful

From Nature.

06:33 / 15.01.02

I wonder what would be the killer app that would need such a huge increase in power. The universal translator? Any other ideas?

odd jest on horn

08:45 / 15.01.02

ummm. Doom IV? cryptobreaking?

11:55 / 15.01.02

A killer app is not really needed for something that is smaller and faster by orders of magnitude.

Also can handle blurry/fuzzy data. Should be able to do fluid dynamics (for weather forcasts etc...) to a much greater accuracy and length of time. Also can look ahead to every state of a system - so real time processing is so much faster.

oooh and it makes QM calculations a piece of piss.

killer app will probably be designing better quantum computers. Or even accuratly making stock market predictions...hence collapsing the western world.

13:17 / 15.01.02

Sorry should have made myself clearer.
I forgot that fuzzy had a very specific meaning.

Quick example.
Weather forcasting. You have elevations, temparatures and pressures etc.. in a grid. A small change in any of these can make a big difference to a long range forcast. So you calculate by adding a small error +/- to each measurement. You re-calculate the whole thing for as many different errors as your processing power will allow. You gat a wide range of results. If 70% of the results predict rain then you have a 70% chance of rainfall.

In a quantum computer you can enter all the measurements with superimposed errors and get out the prediction. This allows you to use finer errors (giving a more accurate prediction)

(information from sci.physics.research newsgroup)

also
http://www.stanford.edu/~zimmej/T361/Final%20Project/qcomputelimits.htm

So it doesn`t really do anything new, just faster and better. I`ve heard some people saying that quantum entanglement can get quantum computers to do entirely new things (hence unbreakable encryption) but never heard of a device actually being made yet.

15:15 / 15.01.02

So when are these findings going to be appied to the crystal skulls?
The theory regarding the use of crystal as data storage is getting closer to unravelling the importance of teh skulls. Personally I feel that there is data stored in them, using light. This thread only seems to confirm this feeling for me.well blow me

22:54 / 17.01.02

I would say AI will be the killer-app. But I have a feeling that the solution to AI is something we have to work out rather than just throw faster hardware at and it could probably work on todays hardware if only we knew how...

Sleeper

00:03 / 18.01.02

Oh, they work already.

All you need is a neural net of sufficient size, and the time to teach it. The catch is, we still don't fully understand *how* they work.

Quantum computing is interesting in that it offers an entirely new type of nerual net, which can offer an entirely new type of intelligence, one we have never encountered that thinks in ways we can't even imagine.

Now that, I am both fascinated and frightened by at once.

07:12 / 18.01.02

Decipher
Stel Pavlou

Covers the entire frozen light/ quantum computing thing. It might be fiction (and bloody good fiction) bu it contains a list of references as long as your arm.

How about overlaying a neural net on top of a quantum computer? Should be pretty similar to how Hameroff and co. think the brain works. It`s a pity that uncertainty prevents brain download. *sigh*. I`ll have to wait till the laws of physics change again b4 I can become a vacuum dwelling robot.