Yeah, not so much a "hope" for me though. When I read the title I just really doubted they meant to say what it sounded like they were saying. And sure enough, they didn't.

There very likely isn't any computational model that can solve any problems that some TM equivalent method can't. It's just a matter of doing them faster.

In your first reply you mentioned that computers are based on binary logic - on or off. I thought you were getting at quantum computing where you can have a combination of the two.

From the article - "One is the discovery of a material that allows electrons to switch states really quickly that could improve magnetic random access memory speeds by a factor of thousand." So, yeah, that's essentially what I said.

If the difference is that a single electron can store on or more bits then this is definitely equivalent to a Turing Machine.The only thing a Turing Machine specifies for storage is a sequence of symbols. How you create the symbols, whether by on/off bits or an electron that can represent multiple bits, is completely irrelevant as to whether or not is is the equivalent of a TM.

Ack! Should have read more carefully before posting. Not "pointless drudgery" - there's definitely a point to it. More like tedious drudgery to support the interesting bits.

They're not. But there seem to be a whole bunch of people who like to turn to science or technology for some type of transcendent experience or something.

"Oh almighty computer, how powerful you are! Surely your intellect will excel beyond us puny humans soon. I am so unworthy. *Grovel*"

It's just a desire to have something to take the place of what the faithful crowd use some omnipotent god for. All over a tool that can do pointless drudgery work quickly and efficiently so that us humans can spend our time working on interesting stuff. Meh.

Hmmm, I'm not so sure. Unless I'm missing something in the article the proposal does not offer anything new toward quantum computing. The advantages listed are the ability to switch electron states very quickly to improve RAM speeds and being able to read the spin of electrons - both without requiring excessive power to drive it.

I'm not sure how quantum computers compare to TMs. After some quick browsing it looks like they don't have the computational speed potential of the (only theoretical) non-deterministic Turing Machine.

I admit you got me at first. I guess I was never a fan of people determined to turn science and technology into religions. Those topics are already cool enough as they are. Plus there are enough faith-based alternatives for that kind of thing if it feels like it's something you need in your life.

When I first read the headline I thought the physicist was offering a computational model alternative to the Turing Machine. It sounds like he's offering a new type of computer, not computing.

So what would be the budget for creating a medium-sized star?

To claim there is no god or supreme power in the universe requires just as much faith as claiming there is one God who gave you a book of rules.

Both beliefs require faith. Hell, all beliefs that are not the result of strict logic (given set of assumptions X, the set of conclusions Y must also be true) require an element of faith. The former belief can only be considered in the realm of "religion" and "myth" by seriously perverting the common definitions of those words.

To even entertain the notion of a god, "supreme power", or whatever you want to call it takes way more faith than not bothering with it in the first place.

How Windows 3.1 can be considered "good" in any sense of the word is beyond me.

True. I've heard of this position referred to as "Apatheism".

Yeah no. Not sure if this applies to software testing (although some cases can be so unpredictable that you might as well refer to them as random), but the results of some quantum events are indeed random. Even with perfect knowledge of all variables from some moment in the past, some future events are impossible to predict. There are no hidden variables.

To defend Mathematics a bit, it does tend to advance much more quickly than Physics since it isn't hampered by the restrictions of the real world.

Just think of General Relativity and non-Euclidean Geometry. Often times when a new scientific concept is created/discovered and a model is required to flesh it out, all you need to do is look around existing mathematics and, oh look, there's an app for that.

Not so fast. Those Nazis took much of their innovations from an American.

Mathematics cannot be the language of the universe as the vast majority of the universe does not communicate any ideas. The parts of it that do is an insignificant, tiny portion that includes us and whatever other self-aware/reasoning beings that may be out there.

What mathematics is are a set of insanely great tools that we use to create models helping us to describe the universe. One thing we've learned from math is that self-referential systems tend to have issues that can crop up in spots. And it's hard to get more self-referential than a subset of the universe trying to understand the whole thing.

Saying that mathematics is sufficient to describe the real world, no matter how successful it has been at it so far, is awfully presumptuous.