If Lloyd’s hypothetical model can be built, the world will have computers that could be 100 million times as powerful as a Pentium-based PC … In a quantum computer, there would be no flow: electrons would orbit their home atoms, and each bit of data would be registered by changing the energy level of a single electron. A bit would be shifted by copying the energy level from one atom to its neighbor, for example, by physically pressing the two atoms together.
Predictor: Lloyd, Seth
Prediction, in context:In a 1995 article for Wired magazine, Charles Platt interviews Seth Lloyd of MIT about potential new leaps in computing, and thus networking, power. Platt writes: ”Seth Lloyd has … made crucial advances showing how the bizarre, fledgling science of quantum computation may be implemented in the real world. Even skeptics admit that Lloyd’s work has brought us a step closer to the limits of size and speed in computers … If Lloyd’s hypothetical model can be built, the world will have computers that could be 100 million times as powerful as a Pentium-based PC … Quantum computation has become fiercely competitive. When Lloyd first delved into it in 1990, no more than six other theorists in the world were actively involved. Today, he thinks there may be more than a hundred, all of them lured by its incredible potential. So far, however, quantum computation has not been tested in the laboratory. Lloyd has no way of knowing whether he’s on a trail that leads to ultimate computing power, or a dead end … In a quantum computer, there would be no flow: electrons would orbit their home atoms, and each bit of data would be registered by changing the energy level of a single electron. A bit would be shifted by copying the energy level from one atom to its neighbor, for example, by physically pressing the two atoms together … And if the atomic chain consists of a single organometallic-polymer molecule containing as many as a billion atoms, we’d end up with a central processor that could manipulate more data than you’d find in the entire memory of a PC.”
Date of prediction: January 1, 1995
Topic of prediction: Information Infrastructure
Subtopic: Pipeline/Switching/Hardware
Name of publication: Wired
Title, headline, chapter name: A Million MHz CPU? If Seth Lloyd’s Right, Someday We’ll Have ‘Quantum Computers’ 100 million Times More Powerful Than Today’s Pentium-Based PC
Quote Type: Paraphrase
Page number or URL of document at time of study:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.03/limits_pr.html
This data was logged into the Elon/Pew Predictions Database by: Anderson, Janna Quitney