Re:Holographic/Optical computing (Score 1)

In his 1999 book, The Age of Spiritual Machines, Ray Kurzweil offers this assessment of optical computing: "The advantage of an optical computer is that it is massively parallel with potentially trillions of simultaneous calculations. Its disadvantage is that it is not programmable and performs a fixed set of calculations for a given configuration of optical computing elements. But for important classes of problems such as recognizing patterns, it combines massive parallelism (a quality shared by the human brain) with extremely high speed (which the human brain lacks)."