From:	Phil Levis <pal@**.BROWN.EDU>
Subject:	Re: Real-Life Computing ...(OT, obviously)
Date:	Wed, 27 May 1998 03:51:28 -0400

On Tue, 26 May 1998, Robert Nesius wrote:

> Software for that project Golden Master). One of them told me that
> when the bus speeds get up to 100mghz or so, current technologies only
> allow for the bus to be 1-2 centimeters long. That's not much room to

This changes with optical technology. Light travels much faster than
electricity.

> There's a whole new angle developing in computing technology though -
> Quantum Computers. They've actually successfully solved a problem
> using a device exploiting quantum theory stuff. It's mostly over
> my head, but the example used involved 4 "operations" to be performed
> to make a decision. ie: a comparison. The quantum computer
> solved all four possiblities at once... This is technology that
> probably won't see the light of day though until....2050? :)

I sat in on a few lectures on this topic. My personal opinion is that they
will fill a similar role to that of biological/genetic computation;
problem formulation is tough, and takes a long time, but once it's set up,
one can compute at amazing speeds. Not really well suited for normal
computer use, really.

The one area that quantum computers excel is cryptography. Several
leading researchers believe that once some of the techniques are
honed, public key cryptography will no longer be very secure; simple
formulations can solve for all the possible key combinations quite
effortlessly. One of the lecturers commented that once this development
was discovered, an extremely large (say, in the tens of millions) grant
came from a consortium of three letter agencies.

Phil