Alternative or Advanced Computing

Information processing in some form or another is essential for survival of all organisms, and the computational requirements grow as the organisms and their environment becomes more complex. Computing is extremely important for nearly all technologies involved in transhumanism, either on the design stage or as an integral part of the system. This makes it very interesting to study just how powerful computers can become and if it is possible to use exotic architectures to solve specialised problems.

Sections

State of the Art Computing
Reversible Computing
Quantum Computing
Optical Computing
Molecular Computing
Other Sites
Books
See Also

State of the Art Computing

Solid State Memory Study. A very through study of current and near-future solid state memories.
Distributed Computing in Yahoo

Reversible Computing

Due to thermodynamic constraints most computations dissipate energy. By using reversible systems, this dissipation can be minimized, something that will be necessary in order to build nanocomputers.

Reversible Logic page by Ralph Merkle.

Signal Entropy and the Thermodynamics of Computation by Neil Gershenfeld at the Physics and Media Group at MIT Media Lab. (PDF version) Introduction to the thermodynamics of computation, and how the number of degrees of fredom influences heat dissipation.

Quantum Computing

Quantum computation uses the nonintuitive effects of quantum mechanics to do computations much faster than normal Turing computers - assuming quantum computers can be built in practice.

A Million MHz CPU? by Charles Platt (Article in Wired, March 1995). Interview with Seth Loyd about quantum com puting.
Quantum Computing with Molecules by Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang (Scientific American June 1998).
Quantum Computers by John K Clark. Informal posting about quantum computers and what they may be able to do.
Quantum Information Home Page (has excellent introductions to quantum cryptography, computation and communication).
Quantum computation: a tutorial by Samuel L. Braunstein.
A Brief History of Quantum Computing By Simon Bone and Matias Castro. Contains a list of links scored for readability and content.
Quantum Computing FAQ
ONRA report: Quantum Functional Devices (from 2nd Intenational Conference, 23-25 May 1995, Matsue, Japan). There is already a lot of work underway to build useful quantum devices.
Bulk Spin Resonance Quantum Computation, Neil A. Gershenfeld and Isaac L. Chuang, Science 275, pp. 350-356 (1997). Likely a very important paper, since it demonstrates how to make a reliable quantum computer out of bulk matter.
Adding Cellular Automaton
Preprints from the Stanford-Berkeley-MIT-IBM Quantum Computation Research Project
Quantum computing in Yahoo.

Quantum Communication

Related to quantum computation is quantum cryptography, the use of quantum properties to create strong encryption.

Do I Invest in Quantum Communications Links For My Company? By Matias Castro

Optical Computing

Since electrical signals move slower than light, it would appear reasonable to try to develop computers based on light instead of electrons.

Lighting Computer Storage: A new optical switch may revolutionize data storage by John Toon. About the possibility for a three-dimensional optical storage system.
Professor Kelvin Wagner's Optical Computing Research

Molecular Computing

Another idea is to use chemical reactions to do computation, using very large numbers of molecules to do massively parallel calculations.

Gene Genie (Wired 3.08, Thomas A. Bass).
Molecular Computation of Solutions to Combinatorial Problems by Leonard M. Adleman (in researchindex). The article that really started everything.
A Bibliography of Molecular Computation and Splicing Systems. A bibliography in progress, with links to relevant pages.
Publications on DNA based Computers. Links to some interesting papers (including breaking DES encryption and error-correction in DNA computers).
ELBA Information Network. A research program in bioelectronics (the use of biological materials and biological architectures for information processing systems and new devices).
Erik's Molecular Computation page. Links to papers, conferences and journals.
On Constructing a Molecular Conputer by Leonard M. Adleman (compressed postscript).
A DNA and restriction enzyme implementation of Turing machines by Paul Wilhelm Karl Rothemund
Leonard M. Adleman, Paul W. K. Rothemund, Sam Roweis, Erik Winfree: ``On Applying Molecular Computation To The Data Encryption Standard''