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Fascinating, an analog computer. Reading about it on wikipedia, it seems analog computers have been almost completely forgotten in the digital age. It makes me
by ealloc 13y ago
Fascinating, an analog computer. Reading about it on wikipedia, it seems analog computers have been almost completely forgotten in the digital age. It makes me wonder what kind of analog computer would be possible now with 21st century technology, especially because of discoveries in condensed matter.
For example, could an electrical analog system be a way of carrying out large-time molecular dynamics simulations? With proper tuning of the material, might you be able to create arbitrary potentials between the electrons within it so that they would interact roughly like atoms in an MD simulation? Or, perhaps you could create an analog chip where the electrons would 'naturally' solve various NP-hard problems, effectively by brute force?
- jonmrodriguez 13y agoBased on your comment, I did a little searching for the terms (single electron circuit) and found this interesting document. Maybe it's the kind of thing you're talking about: http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/suppl/10.1142/p650/suppl_file/p650_chap01.pdf http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/suppl/10.1142/p650/suppl_... -- For a completely different portrayal of futuristic mechanical computers, check out Neal Stephenson's story The Diamond Age. It's set in an era of nanotech, and the computers are nanoscale clockwork computers.
- dalek_cannes 13y agoRod-logic! http://www.halcyon.com/nanojbl/NanoConProc/nanocon2.html http://www.halcyon.com/nanojbl/NanoConProc/nanocon2.html
- anigbrowl 13y agoReading about it on wikipedia, it seems analog computers have been almost completely forgotten in the digital age. Musicians are still using them. Modular synthesizers are the bomb.
- greendestiny 13y agoYou might also enjoy reading about this experiment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MONIAC_Computer
- noir_lord 13y agoThe concept of a really advanced mechanical/analogue computer is covered really well in "The Diamond Age". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
- cdwhite 13y agoActually, people are all the time now going the other direction (or proposing to): they use cold atoms to simulate setups from condensed matter. The general idea is that you can use lasers to site the atoms on a lattice, and then tune the interactions between the atoms to get all sorts of physics. A quick Google Scholar search turns up http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6867/abs/415039a.html http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v415/n6867/abs/415039a.... , wherein Greiner et al. simulate the Hubbard model (it would appear---I don't have access to the paper at the moment. This is cool, because the Hubbard model is a simple and displays interesting phenomena, but understanding it is a hard problem. The Hamiltonian (that is to say, the energy) consists only of a kinetic energy plus an interaction between the spin up and spin down particles on the same site (e.g. if I have two spin up bosons and four spin down bosons, the interaction contribution to the energy is 8 U, where U is a constant parameter---the strength of the interaction.) Depending on this interaction strength U, the system might behave either like a conductor or an insulator. The problem is hard to deal with analytically (for reasons I can't say I understand) and, as I understand it, the space of possible states is so huge that the numerics become computationally intractible at about a lattice 5 sites x 5 sites x 5 sites. So being able to see the phase transition happen is very neat, and exactly what you expect from an "analog quantum computer": simulating with cold atoms a system that we can't really simulate with ordinary computers.