[got "a little" off-topic] New paradigms [was: request: python style decorators / aspect orientation]

[Daniel Keep]

Georg Wrede wrote:
> [...]
> Of course many a consultant, guest lecturer, and downright charlatan
> made a living on it. And they just pretended to be explaining the thing,
> while making sure that folks didn't really see how simple and mundane
> the whole thing was. Grand visions of the future where everything is an
> Object, and where those Objects simply and easily float across computers
> and the net (entirely disregarding different OSs or CPU architectures,
> of course!), gather information and come back giving you info and
> flowers from Jane.

Why does the phrase "intelligent agents" suddenly spring to mind? :P

> [...]
> 
> Oh, and incidentally, why does quantum computing come to my mind? For
> example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qubits has a nice picture and some
> esoteric rambling. I'm not saying it's not for real, but I'd sure be
> amazed if ten years from now we have any real-world practical stuff
> coming out of it. I once read an article on how you could use a glass of
> milk and its quantum states to compute (I forget what, but it was pretty
> damn near the Meaning of Life) amazing and otherwise impossible stuff.

I actually had to do research on this and give a seminar about it at
university, so I can now ruin the mystique of it for you :)

Basically quantum computing is nothing more than massively parallel
probabilistic brute force.  For example, if you want an answer to the
travelling salesman problem, you'd just throw it at a quantum computer
which will go off and work out, say, a few thousand possible answers.
You then measure these answers and pick the most statistically
significant answer.

QC is all about stacking the odds so that given a particular number of
samples, you have a reasonable chance of getting the right answer.  This
is how things like Shor's algorithm for factoring primes in polynomial
time work (and yes; it *does* actually work.  People have actually used
it to factor small primes).

The interesting thing is the hardware.  You mentioned a glass of milk;
while I haven't heard of that, I do know that a few guys used a
thimbleful of chloroform to factor a smallish prime.  Hell, you can
build a quantum computer out of almost any molecule you can suspend in
water; each atom's spin is one qubit, and you use RF to alter the spins
(different atoms react to different frequencies).

It's all very interesting, but it's fundamentally just picking random
answers and hoping you get the right one.  The difference is that QC
does this very, very fast.  It's like the difference in the old games
that had both software and hardware renderers.  They did exactly the
same calculations, it's just the hardware renderers were faster and
could do higher resolutions.

Tangentially, this is also how DNA computing works; throw a few million
strands of DNA at the problem, and you're just *bound* to get the right
answer!

> Maybe I should start selling a black box called OD (it's a secret what
> it stands for, but for you guys, if you don't tell, it stands for the
> Oracle of Delphi). [...] Oh, L.
> Ron Hubbard was our first customer, and he sure died rich and with a
> smile on his face.

LOL.

> [...]
> 
> Oh, my! Now that I think about this, I have to confess I've already done
> it for real. [...]
> 
> Gee, I guess writing my memoirs would be even more fun than the D book.

That's hilarious.  I think people are just gullible by nature :P

	-- Daniel

-- 
int getRandomNumber()
{
    return 4; // chosen by fair dice roll.
              // guaranteed to be random.
}

http://xkcd.com/

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