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Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

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Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#11

Post by forgotprevpass »

Havoc wrote: post #8

Scott is making it really difficult for people to follow along. My initial reaction was "wtf am I looking at" followed shortly by "why wasn't the HN link pointed straight to the PBS article?". And clearly others agree given that the top comment at the moment is a PBS link. No doubt the guy is competent but this just smells like a poorly executed attempt to move traffic to the blog. I fully expect it to get ignored as…

If you're not familiar, Scott is a professor of MIT, specializing in quantum computing. Many readers of his blog are also well known in this sphere, so they would have more technical insight, more in depth than the pbs layman's version.

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#12

Post by Jtsummers »

Havoc wrote: post #8

Scott is making it really difficult for people to follow along. My initial reaction was "wtf am I looking at" followed shortly by "why wasn't the HN link pointed straight to the PBS article?". And clearly others agree given that the top comment at the moment is a PBS link. No doubt the guy is competent but this just smells like a poorly executed attempt to move traffic to the blog. I fully expect it to get ignored as…

If you're a writer and you have an article available on some 3rd party site, wouldn't you inform your blog readers of it? Besides, the poster of this link is not Scott Aaronson, so why accuse him of attempting "to move traffic to the blog"?

EDIT: And a blog without advertisements at that.

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#13

Post by klodolph »

z3phyr wrote: post #2

Neuromorphic Computing? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuromorphic_engineering

That's just a different architecture for a classical, non-quantum computer. (Keep in mind that analog computers came first, so this is a call back to the first half of the 20th century, albeit on a much larger scale.)

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#15

Post by trhway »

> If so, then much like in Zeno’s paradox, your computer would have completed infinitely many steps in a mere two seconds!

The next target isn't infinitely many. The target is infinitely infinitely many.

Like something along the lines of forking infinite number of parallel Universes - that is pretty much "many-verse" interpretation of the quantum superposition(and thus computing) - enhanced with forking of infinitely many time dimensions inside each of the said Universes...

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#16

Post by dkarapetyan »

trhway wrote: post #15

> If so, then much like in Zeno’s paradox, your computer would have completed infinitely many steps in a mere two seconds! The next target isn't infinitely many. The target is infinitely infinitely many. Like something along the lines of forking infinite number of parallel Universes - that is pretty much "many-verse" interpretation of the quantum superposition(and thus computing) - enhanced with forking of infinitely…

Infinitely infinitely many is still infinitely many. N x N has the same cardinality as N. Now if you meant N ^ N then that's actually different. "x" means set product and "^" means function space.

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#17

Post by rhth54656 »

But the more you accelerate the spaceship, the more energy you need, with the energy diverging to infinity as your speed approaches that of light. At some point, your spaceship will become so energetic that it, too, will collapse into to a black hole.

That is simply wrong. It is called relativity for a reason. An object might be traveling arbitrarily fast, but in its reference frame it is not moving.

That pretty much invalidates that part of the article.

For curious readers: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/3436/if-a-1kg-mas...

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#18

Post by rohansingh »

rhth54656 wrote: post #17

But the more you accelerate the spaceship, the more energy you need, with the energy diverging to infinity as your speed approaches that of light. At some point, your spaceship will become so energetic that it, too, will collapse into to a black hole. That is simply wrong. It is called relativity for a reason. An object might be traveling arbitrarily fast, but in its reference frame it is not moving. That pretty much…

An object can accelerate arbitrarily, but in any reference frame it will never be traveling faster than c.

Of course, it won't collapse into a black hole, but the amount of energy needed to accelerate further will increase asymptotically.

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#19

Post by andrewflnr »

rhth54656 wrote: post #17

But the more you accelerate the spaceship, the more energy you need, with the energy diverging to infinity as your speed approaches that of light. At some point, your spaceship will become so energetic that it, too, will collapse into to a black hole. That is simply wrong. It is called relativity for a reason. An object might be traveling arbitrarily fast, but in its reference frame it is not moving. That pretty much…

Also, I can't see how, theoretically, your ship turning into a black hole would prevent the answer to your computation from being received.

Re: Is There Anything Beyond Quantum Computing?

#20

Post by rhth54656 »

rohansingh wrote: post #18
rhth54656 wrote: post #17

But the more you accelerate the spaceship, the more energy you need, with the energy diverging to infinity as your speed approaches that of light. At some point, your spaceship will become so energetic that it, too, will collapse into to a black hole. That is simply wrong. It is called relativity for a reason. An object might be traveling arbitrarily fast, but in its reference frame it is not moving. That pretty much…

An object can accelerate arbitrarily, but in any reference frame it will never be traveling faster than c . Of course, it won't collapse into a black hole, but the amount of energy needed to accelerate further will increase asymptotically.

That is actually false from the frame of the traveler. Using constant acceleration, the traveler will observe constant energy usage. Then length contraction will guarantee that you can reach speeds arbitrarily close to speed of light( and also any location in the universe ) in about ~50 years with 1G acceleration.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_travel_using_constant_acc...

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