4 ms·

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 order

• 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/...