3 ms·

This appears to basically be an analog optical computer - it inputs some 2D data using an LCD, puts it through a bunch of optical transforms, and then captures

This appears to basically be an analog optical computer - it inputs some 2D data using an LCD, puts it through a bunch of optical transforms, and then captures the output with a camera. This probably does have some kind of obscure use cases where it makes sense, but it's very hard to compete with modern silicon for raw compute using some kind of hybrid method - moving data in and out of the optical part is just painful compared to keeping it all digital/electrical. The main problem is that computers today aren't actually slow =)

imaginenore 11y ago
Today's computers are very slow. Try modeling something complex, let's say 1 billion water molecules interacting. Then realize that 1 billion molecules is orders of orders of magnitude far from modeling a cup of water.
- jjoonathan 11y ago
  > 1 billion molecules is orders of orders of magnitude far Understatement. There are 50 trillion atoms in a cell, 50 trillion cells in a human body (give or take an order of magnitude or two for definitions and caveats). Furthermore, big swaths of chemistry/biochemistry are inherently quantum mechanical (classical mech + E&M doesn't explain why molecules snap into little geometric shapes, let alone how those shapes interact) which has god-awful asymptotic complexity on account of the "present state" of the system (wavefunction) being a probability for each possible configuration of the system rather than a description of a single configuration. A purpose-built silicon supercomputer will struggle to simulate a single small protein using classical-mechanics approximations for a millisecond (and there are millions of those per cell and trillions of cells per body). There's a lot of room for improvement.
  - mechagodzilla 11y ago
    Right, but they didn't build an optical computer that is even close to competitive with something like this:http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/HC26-11-day1-epub/HC26.11-1-High-Performance-epub/HC26.11.130-Anton-2-Butts-Shaw-Shaw-Res-Search.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/...

imaginenore 11y ago

Today's computers are very slow. Try modeling something complex, let's say 1 billion water molecules interacting. Then realize that 1 billion molecules is orders of orders of magnitude far from modeling a cup of water.

jjoonathan 11y ago
> 1 billion molecules is orders of orders of magnitude far Understatement. There are 50 trillion atoms in a cell, 50 trillion cells in a human body (give or take an order of magnitude or two for definitions and caveats). Furthermore, big swaths of chemistry/biochemistry are inherently quantum mechanical (classical mech + E&M doesn't explain why molecules snap into little geometric shapes, let alone how those shapes interact) which has god-awful asymptotic complexity on account of the "present state" of the system (wavefunction) being a probability for each possible configuration of the system rather than a description of a single configuration. A purpose-built silicon supercomputer will struggle to simulate a single small protein using classical-mechanics approximations for a millisecond (and there are millions of those per cell and trillions of cells per body). There's a lot of room for improvement.
- mechagodzilla 11y ago
  Right, but they didn't build an optical computer that is even close to competitive with something like this:http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/HC26-11-day1-epub/HC26.11-1-High-Performance-epub/HC26.11.130-Anton-2-Butts-Shaw-Shaw-Res-Search.pdf http://www.hotchips.org/wp-content/uploads/hc_archives/hc26/...