4 ms·

This should really have a lot more upvotes; this is pretty enormous. Maybe Kurzweil is right after all... Slashdot comments are decent. http://hardware.slas

• Alex3917 19y ago
  The way I'm reading this, our storage capacity today is basically like a bubble wand or a carpenter's level. If you tilt the right side down then the bubble goes all the way up on the left, and if you tilt the left side down then the bubble goes all the way up on the right. This means that bubble wand can hold two values, 0 and 1. With this new process you can essentially tilt the wand a few degrees and have the bubble move only a couple inches and then stop, and then tilt the wand a few more degrees and have the bubble move a little more. In this way you can store any value within a single "box." So instead of it taking 64 "boxes" to store 64 bits, with this new process we can essentially store this much information in a single box. And furthermore, each box is going to be an order of magnitude smaller than our existing boxes today. This may well be the single most important day of our lives, technologically at least. The singularity is indeed near.
  • anamax 19y ago
    It's possible to store multiple bits in lots of devices, including capacitors and inductors. Intel has been shipping flash that stores multiple bits per cell for quite some time. There's an interesting tradeoff between the size of the box, the number of bits, and the required detector. And, if you're going small enough, the charge of an electron.