New type of computer

posted on March 28th, 2009, 3:51 am

The reason I believe it to faster, keep in mind we're talking hypothetically here, is that light travels faster than electricity.  And as far as it not being cheap or small, we have circuits that use light already.......lasers specifically.....and they're not small or cheap setups by any means. 

As far as speed goes for DNA based computing goes, I don't know the specifics, only that its been used for some supposedly advanced algorithms.  That's what I was talking about being in the mid 90's.  I also remember reading somewhere that DNA based computing would allow for computers equivalent to todays largest/most powerful super computers to be extremely small. 

This is all as far as I've read/been taught....by no means am I an expert in computing.  I'm only a 3rd year computer science student.

i agree with mimesot here because light and electricity travel at almost the same speed. (i think that light is a little faster, but not much) the reason that it would be faster is because is because you could assign a different value instead of a 1 or a 0. for instance my name in binary code is D=01000100, i=01101001, r=01110010, c=01100011, o=01101111, m=01101101, e=01100101. however if we could assign an larger range of values to the letters we could shorten it to something like this D=30, i=9, r=18, c=3, o=15, m=13, e=5. so instead of having 56 bits of data to decode it would have only 7

posted on March 28th, 2009, 12:53 pm

(i think that light is a little faster, but not much)

Im quite sure that you are right about that slight difference in speed. I didn't mention it because it's rather neglectable. I think the difference comes from something similar to the refraction index. I'd like to remind you, that molecules are in an excited state for a reasonable time before they reemit light.

the reason that it would be faster is because is because you could assign a different value instead of a 1 or a 0.

I agree that such a behaviour would be a big advantage for storing information an small space.

For calculation such an behavios is not easy to implement in a beneficial way. You need to count the logical gates, you need to process these. When you think of the EQUAL operation, you need 1 AND-gate for 2 incoming bits. To compare 2 bytes (16 incoming bits, talking of coupled single bits) you need 8+4+2+1 = 15 AND-gates. In general you need 2n-1 gates, so it scales linear. This behaviour goes for every most basic operation as far as I know.

How can that be realised with units that store more information in one "bit". The discerning properties of photons is their energy or frequency. The emissions of a molecule are of dieskrete energies, so these steps can be used to encode e.g. numers from 1 to 128.  To do a logical EQUAL (this is not necesssarily an AND(!)) we want to have 2 incoming photons result in one emitted photon, which represents true, if and only if the 2 photons are of the same frequency. This is quite difficult to implement.

I can imagine that it is impossible to have a molecule, that has that consists ot two parts, that have te same excitment energy. If both parts are excited at the same time, it may be possible to channalize these energies to excite a third state of the "true"-energy, which will be emitted then. The energy of the other states could be dissipated in smaller steps to avoid differedt excitments. This could be done for all pairs of allowed frequencies.

I don't know if this is a possible solution, but you sse from there, that this will also scale linear, this time nit in gates but in the number of spezial parts of your EQUAL-molecule. So you can't be sure that this advantage goes further than storing data with higher density.

posted on March 31st, 2009, 3:20 am

i kind of understand what you are saying but i got a little lost toward the end. (its ok i got enough of it  to understand your point)