Tom Wujec: How we’ll plant a seed … and grow a table from TED Ideas on Vimeo.

“Technology allows us to augment human capabilities,“ says Autodesk Fellow Tom Wujec. It also allows us to rethink everything, even things we think we’ve pretty much nailed by now, like the design of a chair.

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A Single Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster than Your PC

 

Using quantum interference – the vibrations of the atoms themselves – the team was able to run the complete discrete Fourier transform extremely quickly by encoding the inputs into an optically tailored vibrational wave packet which is then run through an excited iodine molecule whose atomic elements are oscillating at known intervals and picked up by a receiver on the other side. The entire process takes just a few tens of femtoseconds (that’s a quadrillionth of a second). So we’re not just talking faster data flow or processing here; these are speeds that are physically impossible on any kind of conventional electronic device.

A Single Molecule Computes Thousands of Times Faster than Your PC