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Electrons interact with each other, photons don't. What magical device do they use to take TWO separate 1-hot encoded optical signals and produce a single 1-ho

Electrons interact with each other, photons don't. What magical device do they use to take TWO separate 1-hot encoded optical signals and produce a single 1-hot output? Figure 6 just shows a black box labeled "decoder" which is never explained, anywhere. I think this word salad^H^H^H^H^H paper might have been produced by an LLM.

jlokier 3y ago
Photons do interact with each other: • Gravitationally. • Conversion to matter-antimatter pairs. • In non-linear optical media, which is technically all substances, but effect strength varies. Of course electrons are involved in the last of those, but not in the way you mean. Non-linear optical media electrons remain bound to their atoms, and act by orbital resonance effects. The last of those is a realistic path to a general-purpose photonic computer. I worked on a design for one, and I was surprised to find our design would run not much faster than a good electronic computer, while being larger, due to optical wavelengths. But it may have been more energy efficient if we'd built it. Or rather, the calculation part may have been more efficient, with memory being less efficient than transistors. Also we didn't spend much time optimising it. Small photonic machines are good for particular calculations such as energy-efficient FFTs, but that is smaller scale than a general purpose processor. (If anyone is interested in photonic computer design, feel free to get in touch!)
- crotchfire 3y ago
  Yes, I know about gravity and antimatter. Let me know when those become relevant to microelectronics. And, nonlinear optical media do involve electrons -- that was precisely my point. And that's why those "optical" computers perform no better than electrical computers: because they are in fact electrical computers that use photons for communication, not for computation. But using photons for communication is nothing new, we've been doing that since the late 1970s.
  - Nevermark 3y ago
    > And that's why those "optical" computers perform no better than electrical computers: because they are in fact electrical computers that use photons for communication, not for computation. No, in this case photons would be doing computation across a substrate with electrons in it. Similarly, in electronics the electrons do the computation on a doped substrate. We don’t say the doping is doing the computation, although it defines what the computation will be (I.e. the logical behavior).

jlokier 3y ago

Photons do interact with each other: • Gravitationally. • Conversion to matter-antimatter pairs. • In non-linear optical media, which is technically all substances, but effect strength varies. Of course electrons are involved in the last of those, but not in the way you mean. Non-linear optical media electrons remain bound to their atoms, and act by orbital resonance effects. The last of those is a realistic path to a general-purpose photonic computer. I worked on a design for one, and I was surprised to find our design would run not much faster than a good electronic computer, while being larger, due to optical wavelengths. But it may have been more energy efficient if we'd built it. Or rather, the calculation part may have been more efficient, with memory being less efficient than transistors. Also we didn't spend much time optimising it. Small photonic machines are good for particular calculations such as energy-efficient FFTs, but that is smaller scale than a general purpose processor. (If anyone is interested in photonic computer design, feel free to get in touch!)

crotchfire 3y ago
Yes, I know about gravity and antimatter. Let me know when those become relevant to microelectronics. And, nonlinear optical media do involve electrons -- that was precisely my point. And that's why those "optical" computers perform no better than electrical computers: because they are in fact electrical computers that use photons for communication, not for computation. But using photons for communication is nothing new, we've been doing that since the late 1970s.
- Nevermark 3y ago
  > And that's why those "optical" computers perform no better than electrical computers: because they are in fact electrical computers that use photons for communication, not for computation. No, in this case photons would be doing computation across a substrate with electrons in it. Similarly, in electronics the electrons do the computation on a doped substrate. We don’t say the doping is doing the computation, although it defines what the computation will be (I.e. the logical behavior).