[extropy-chat] D-Wave premiere of 16 qubit processor

[Ricardo Barreira]

AGI can be applied on all those problems of course, what's the doubt
about that? (assuming the AGI is tame/friendly enough to solve
problems for us, of course)

About quantum computing:

1) Protein folding has been proven to be NP-hard. NP-hard is at least
as hard as NP-complete, and it's not thought that QC gives an
exponential speedup for NP-complete problems, only a quadratic
speedup.
2 and 3) If quantum effects are present, I suppose a QC can at the
very least help you simulating nano-machinery, which should be useful.
More than that, I don't know.



On 2/14/07, Robert Bradbury <robert.bradbury at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Can anyone show me how quantum computers *or* AGI apply to the following
> problems:
>
> 1) Protein folding (presumably done through classical molecular dynamics
> simulations) [1]
> 2) Nano-part design
> 3) Nano-system, esp. nanorobot, design
>
> These in my book are the *hard* problems.  Whether we can crack encryption
> keys means almost *nothing* IMO relative to a singularity that impacts me in
> my daily life (e.g. off-the-shelf solutions that stop aging cold for
> everyone or being able to direct my 10 kg of nanorobots to sustain whatever
> lavish lifestyle I choose to adopt or starting the process of uploading me
> into my basement nanocomputer).
>
> I do not care if something can solve the seating arrangement at a wedding.
> I do not care if it can drive a car or write haiku or even pass the turing
> test.  I only care if it contributes to solving those three problems.  And
> for those of you who think the D-wave announcement is *cool* or exciting or
> even interesting I'd suggest you reexamine what is really important.
>
> I personally was much more excited by the Intel 80 core 1.# TF processor [3]
> because the implications are that with 1000 processors (@ 62,000W) [4,5] I
> have human brain level computational capacity *and* more importantly we are
> starting to lean in the direction of processors with different "core mixes"
> that I think in a few years will lead to large numbers of people running PC
> + software combinations that make significant contributions to (1) and (2)
> above.
>
> Robert
>
> 1. One can see the growth in known structures in the PDB database [2].
> Though we have not reached that point yet, I suspect we are within a few
> years of the protein folding problem largely going away.  There is not much
> in nature that is "novel".  Once a sufficient number of protein structures
> has been determined experimentally (I'd guess from 100-200,000) there will
> be very few structures in the phase space which do not have a close relative
> whose structure has already been determined.  At that time one will care
> much less about protein folding because it is the final structure which is
> of much more significance and with close relatives in the database one will
> model "structure by similarity" rather than structure by ab initio folding.
> The computational requirements for structure by similarity are significantly
> less than the requirements of ab initio folding.
> 2.
> http://www.pdb.org/pdb/statistics/contentGrowthChart.do?content=total&seqid=100
> 3.
> http://www.intel.com/research/platform/terascale/teraflops.htm
> 4. The real "breakthrough" will be 1PF @ 100W.  At that point human brain
> level computational capacity will be cheaper than humans (on a power basis).
> 5. As the chip also appears to be designed so one can stack memory chips on
> top of the processor it is nice to see Intel is following up on my 10 year
> old suggestions for 3D chip architectures, e.g. [6].
> 6.
> http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/Conferences/Extro3/cpu4.jpg
>
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