In the Aug 31 2000 issue of Nature there is an article by Seth LLoyd
called "The Ultimate physical limits to computation", I'll just quote the
last 3 sentences:
"Whether or not it is possible to make computation take place in the extreme
regimes envisaged in this paper is an open question. The answer to this question
lies in future technological development, which is difficult to predict.
If, as seems highly unlikely, it is possible to extrapolate the exponential progress of
Moore's law into the future, then it will take only 250 years to make up the 40 orders of
magnitude in performance between current computers that perform 10^10 operations
per second on 10^10 bits and our 1-kg ultimate laptop that performs 10^51 operations
per second on 10^31 bits."
John K Clark jonkc@att.net
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