These computational metamaterials don't need electricity to be powered (you need something that will shoot the photons on them and read back the values off tho).
Machine learning would be much, much faster on these as you have O(1) differential calculus.
They don't heat up. You can possibly build a house sized CPU out of these. I can see it, a city block sized CPU and a nuclear reactor next to it.
Did you know that on an analog machine, you can do sort in O(n)?
I'm not Scott, but spaghetti sort isn't any kind of computational breakthrough, it's just trading off measurement error for computation time.
Here's the digital version of spaghetti sort:
1. Enumerate the possible lengths of spaghetti that your spaghetti sorter can distinguish above a certain probability. This enumeration will be small and finite.
2. Round your values to one of these lengths.
3. Radix sort or bucket sort those values in O(n).
"You don't actually want qubits, you want an analog computer with differentiable signals. Most likely photonic. Qubits are a dead evolution branch.
I've been recently exploring computational metamaterials for photonic computation.
http://users.ece.utexas.edu/~aalu/research%20-%20page%203.ht.... (there's quite a few papers on this but unfortunately they are all paywalled. Spoiler alert, they seem to be based entirely on Fourier transform).
These computational metamaterials don't need electricity to be powered (you need something that will shoot the photons on them and read back the values off tho).
Machine learning would be much, much faster on these as you have O(1) differential calculus.
They don't heat up. You can possibly build a house sized CPU out of these. I can see it, a city block sized CPU and a nuclear reactor next to it.
Did you know that on an analog machine, you can do sort in O(n)?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_sort
Hit me up if you wanna chat about this. I've seen the "light" (xdddd) now and can't go back to stupid bits.
I'm not like super married to the metamaterials but analog photonic trumps quantum for just about every task I can think of."
- adamnemecek
Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14674333