
Technique to manipulate electrons with light could make computers much faster - Menachem36
http://www.opli.net/opli_magazine/eo/2018/light-could-make-semiconductor-computers-a-million-times-faster-or-even-go-quantum-may-news/
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smaddox
This reads like a parody of science journalism... It ticks all the boxes.
Simplifying quantum computing to "it runs every possibility in parallel"? Yup.
Making vague and impossible speed up claims? Yup. Etc.

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jrq
Electron will still use too much RAM though... /s

This is cool. It makes me wonder how big a computer can be. If bounded by the
speed of light, could a planet-sized computer ever make any sense?

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overcast
No, because even at the speed of light, a trip around the earth is 133ms.
That's also a straight line, and in a vacuum. Much slower when it involves an
atmosphere, optical fiber, and different routes.

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jrq
That's not so long though, in the scheme of things. Especially if the computer
was very fast.

I read this book Artemis by Andy Weir recently (the guy who wrote the Martian)
and it mentioned a moon Internet, and it was like 8 seconds away from the
earth Internet or something like that. However, and the book didn't mention
it, but what if a computer could be constructed that could perform extremely
large calculations, and it was cheaper to produce there? In the book, they
used a lot of glass for decor, because the ingredients to manufacture it were
byproducts of other manufacturing already present, but something like that
could be possible in space.

I like to imagine a satellite orbiting earth, with a little factory onboard,
and it would send out probes and repurpose all the space junk in orbit and
convert it to energy or use it to build stuff.

A planet computer could be expanding itself in that same way, and even though
the calculations' results might be delayed, that might be more effective.

If humans make it another couple hundred years, they're gonna get to start
thinking and building that stuff. That'll be cool

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lodi
Actually the moon is only 1.3 light seconds away, so a ping of ~2.7s to the
moon is possible!

Mars would be annoying to communicate with though: 25-44.8 minutes for a
roundtrip signal.

