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

[Robert Bradbury]

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<http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/%7Ebradbury/Conferences/Extro3/cpu4.jpg>
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