yesterday’s post talked about the basics of vision, and the way the act of identifying an image can be somewhat simplified; Now I want to address Ed’s idea of Quantum computers, which is an inspired one.

Everything that takes place in a computer has to do with a 0, or a 1. All personal computers are made like this, and it hasn’t changed in years.

Not too far around the corner, are quantum computers, which will be able to deal with a lot more than just 0 and 1. Imagine a person who is paralyzed and can only move his eyeball. It can look left, and it can look right, and people can interpret that left and right as yes and no.

Now imagine that the person develops the ability to move his eye to multiple positions. he can look at a screen, and a camera can record the position of his eye. The screen can be full of letters, and he can look at each letter in turn.

Old way of communicating:

a? no
b? no
c? no
d? yes

the first letter is d

a? no
b? no
c? no
d? no
e? no
f? no
g? no

all the way to
r? yes

the first letter is D, the second is R
until the poor bastard spells “Drink” by which time he has died of thirst.

With the letterboard, the person can swivel his eye to “D_R_I_N_K” in a few seconds. Replace the letters- or suppliment them- with words, and now you can get to pretty normal communications fairly quickly. This, by the way, is similar to the way Stephen Hawking communicates.

Now think of a computer that has the ability to process data not one bit at a time but by having the ability to look at multiple possibilities at once for every input. This isn’t exactly the way it works but the analogy is close enough for comparison. A piecre of data comes into a transistor and makes the transistor output either a 0 or a 1, a piece of data comes into a Quantum “transistor” (for lack of a better term) and can be any value between 0 and 1, or it can be 0, or 1, or 0 AND 1.

So like Ed says, instead of going to each of 100 rooms and answering the yes/no question of “Are my keys here’ each time until you find the keys, you can ask the Quantum computer ‘Which room are my keys in?” and it looks in all of them at once.

I think Ed is on to something here, in that this is the way the human mind works; I additionally think the distinction between memory and processor is blurred as to be almost nonexistent, and the same brain cells that store the information can also process it. Tis makes our whole wetware system a sort of a quantum supercomputer that can not only store, retrieve, and process information, but do so running at clock speeds that are astounding, when compared to the most powerful computers today.

But that’s changing.