Magnus, Thanks for your effort to explain this. I appreciate the difficulty. I am left with many questions but the bottom line is "Bring it On". Who would have thought that Moore's Law would hold as long as it has? If we can jump start a whole new level I'm for it.
I went to a presentation by Intel at Comdex several years ago. Bill Maher was the host and he was asking a panel of experts why computers were such a pain. He said something about buying a computer five years ago and now it is all obsolete and what a drag that was. He picked the wrong audience for that crack. The audience booed and the panel members, including Craig Barrett, CEO of Intel informed him that the reason his old computer is obsolete is that he can now buy one twice as fast. This is a good thing. BTW, Maher's comment that computer geeks love Vegas because they find out there is another use for silicon, went over much better with the crowd. I guess I need to looking into the QC business a bit further for technical details but it seems one of your main points has gotten lost. At least in principle it is easy to imagine computers that are powerful enough to be considered sentient. This has been explored at some length in sci-fi, from Commander Data to Marvin, the HHGG robot with a Real People Personality. Computers are already augmenting human intelligence to an astonishing degree. Hardly a discussion in this forum takes place that doesn't send me scurrying to Google to look up something I have forgotten or to check out something I never heard of. Those with an anthropist bent or the MIMOAT crowd are going to look for any way they can to stay on top of the evolutionary game of King of the Hill. They remind me of the bunch who claimed "Man the Tool User" was unique in the world. Then we found chimps and even otters making and using tools. So, "Man the Speaker" and Possessor of Language was King for a Day until we taught a few chimps to use symbol systems and honeybee engaging in modern dance. Kind of gets down to " the Sole Owner of the Opposable Thumb"... Now that is special. It is not so much the facts or principles that are at stake in whether there are or can be machine intelligence. It is pure chauvinism. After all there are already bits of code out there displaying life-like properties. Viruses spread and reproduce themselves across the internet everyday. I even saw a headline in the Weekly World News (the last bastion of great American journalism) that computer viruses are being spread to humans... This was followed by an update on the World's Fattest Cat eating the World's Fattest Mouse and Satan's face appearing in the skies over Washington. Case -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Magnus Berg Sent: Saturday, February 17, 2007 4:20 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [MD] Quantum computing Hi Case Thanks for your questions about quantum computers. They are probably a good way to start explaining what quantum computers are about. > [Case] > Quantum computing is a bit new to me but I am having trouble seeing how > allowing interference of any sort into the calculations can produce a happy > result. If I am look for a solution to a problem in cryptography how is > evolution going to help? On the one hand it is suggested that qbits will > allow much faster calculations and on the other that the processing power > stems from quantum effects. Are these quantum effects resulting in raw speed > or in better Quality answers? First of all, I *don't* have an in depth understanding of exactly how quantum computers work, nor a deep knowledge in quantum theory. But I've read pretty much about it so I think I have some grasp of what it's about. You can probably find better answers online but here's my take on it. Quantum Computers (QC from now on), is partly about raw speed, but they are not fast in GHz. The speed comes from massive parallelism. And we're not just talking 4, 8, 16 or even 80 cores (as Intel claims to do in 2012). We're talking 2^n simultaneous calculations, where n is the number of qubits in the system. So, for the 16 qubit QC just demoed, that amounts to 65536 simultaneous calculations. The funny, and crucial, thing to understand here is that these calculations are really SIMULTANEOUS. If you don't believe that you might as well stop reading, because that's just one thing that makes QCs conceptually different from digital computers (DC). Some researchers claim the QC uses parallel universes to make the calculations, but how it works is not really the point. The point is that this is *one* way that QCs are really different from DCs. However, to extract the result from a QC, you need to detect the states of the qubits. This is done using some kind of QC/DC interface and will collapse the superpositions of the qubits into digital states, a 0 or 1. And here's another very important thing to realize with regards to the MoQ, when the QC/DC interface collapses the superposition of the qubits into a 1 or 0, it's a Quality Event. Such an event is very similar to what happens when I'm typing right now. The qubits in my brain collapses/decides what to write and then writes it on my computer. >>From what I could find about the demo you mentioned it looked promising but > there are skeptics and I don't suppose I will be looking at super-cooled > chips on my desktop anytime soon. But then I would never have though I would > have a dual core processor on my desktop by now either so who knows. > > I wonder sometimes how appropriate computer metaphors are when thinking of > biological systems. Truly they are useful but how far can we push them. We > have been quick to seize the latest in technology and apply it to our > understanding of biological processes. In the early days of telephony the > brain could be seen as a complicated switching system, the brain is a > thinking machine etc. > > Much of the cognitive sciences proceeds from the notion the brain is a > sophisticated computer running programs. But this metaphor can break down > when pushed. A program is an algorithm, a series of sequential steps. I am > not sure what organisms do is at all sequentially. Computers operate in > discrete steps or clock cycles I don't think organisms work this way. > Certainly computer metaphors are useful but it is easy to overlook the > limitations. To some, I will probably sound like someone reinventing the wheel, but I really think QCs are conceptually different from today's DCs. The metaphors (and many limitations) of DCs doesn't apply to QCs. To claim that the brain is like a QC *is* very different from claiming it's like a DC. > What modern efforts in AI are doing is attempting to simulate in algorithmic > form what brains do organically. So far it seems to me that the value of > this accrues mainly from the effort involved in thinking this through. That > is we know the brain does pattern recognition; how can we construct an > algorithm to recognize patterns. Digitally this requires a brute force > approach. Exactly, but if (when) they are able to use a QC for pattern recognition, it will completely change the playing field. Think neural networks. A DC handling a neural network must simulate every transition in the network, and every added node in the network doubles the time it takes to calculate a result. But a QC is a natural fit for a neural network. The brain *is* a neural network, and a QC *is* a neural network. Adding a new node is "just" a matter of adding a qubit. It will take *no* additional time to calculate a result. The problem being pondered at the moment is how to add an arbitrary number of qubits, and even if that seems very hard, I'm sure they will start to increase from the current 16 in a decade or two. > When you suggest that the brain maybe a quantum computer, how so? Aren't > these attempts at quantum computing still handling binary information? > Aren't they still going to be handling information in discrete steps? Not internally, but as I wrote above, if you want to see a result from the QC, you need to perform the QC/DC conversion step, the Quality event. > I am > not sure how quantum effects would apply to a nervous system. It is my > understanding that quantum effect disappear above the level of complex > molecules. Are you suggesting that macro level information is somehow > processed at the level of protein synthesis? Actually, quantum effects *can* affect larger structures. I'm not sure how they did it in the demo QC but one way is to use a Bose Einstein condensate. As far as I remember, a BEC structure can be created in a superconducting structure, which is probably why they need such powerful cooling. (Actually, I think I read they use photon traps for the demo QC, and then they use entangled particles to detect the states). But if you're asking how quantum effects can affect a nervous system, like a brain, I think BECs can explain that as well. Dana Zohar wrote in "The Quantum Self" that there are some experimental results indicating that BEC structures are affecting the inner working of the brain. But I'm on pretty thin ice here, so don't take my word for it, at least not before I can re-check the source. Best regards, Magnus moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
