Molecular Computation:A Single Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster than Your PC

A Single Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster than Your PC

A demo of a quantum calculation carried out by Japanese researchers has yielded some pretty mind-blowing results: a single molecule can perform a complex calculation thousands of times faster than a conventional computer.

A proof-of-principle test run of a discrete Fourier transform -- a common calculation using spectral analysis and data compression, among other things -- performed with a single iodine molecule transpired very well, putting all the molecules in your PC to shame.

Like other quantum information platforms, molecular computing is in its infancy; we understand some of its mechanisms, but it’s difficult to execute and there are still a lot of unknowns

Molecular Computations

Many people have said that the technology used by the military is ahead of public domain science by at least 2 decades. What if the military or government agency like NSA has already achieved significant breakthrough in the field of molecular computation. Under such circumstances, the government might be having significant technological power its disposal.

How did those molecules manage to get past the FSB bottleneck? This really intrigues me.

reply to post by ventian

How did those molecules manage to get past the FSB bottleneck?

By not using one.

From the article, it sounds like the entire "computer" was a single molecule. Apparently data was encoded in oscillations within iodine atoms. So sort of like using only CPU registers for data. But I'm not sure how well that analogy actually describes what they're doing. The article doesn't go into much detail, and they appear to be describing a method I've never read about before.

reply to post by order in chaos


Hmmm...yet one step closer to quantum computers becoming a fill blown reality...and with quantum computers, self-aware machines will probably follow...what happens next is anyone's guess...