Computing at the Speed of Light

M. Mitchell Waldrop

David R. Selviah

Volkmar Putz, Karl Svozil

We propose to boost the speed of communication and computation by immersing the computing environment into a medium whose index of refraction is smaller than one, thereby trespassing the speed-of-light barrier.

David D. Nolte

In this fascinating book David Nolte explains the technology behind the bandwidth revolution and reveals the future of artificial intelligence. From a leading computer scientist and physicist comes proof that the days of computing with clunky electrons (particles of matter) are just about over, and that the use of photons (particles of light) will change the nature of computing and intelligence, artificial or otherwise, forever. Next generation computers won't just read, they will see, and they will do so faster than we can imagine. Exploring the startling possibilities this would allow, Nolte explains the Intelligent Internet (the net won't just be a database, it will make decisions); light computers (how fibre optics, which speed up the flow of information between computers, will speed up the flow inside them); and hologram hard drives (capable of accessing everything at once). Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind argued that we couldn't understand human consciousness because of the difficulty of engineering - and understanding - at the quantum level. A truly revolutionary work, Machines of Light showed that not only is quantum light technology possible but that its applications will take our understanding of what intelligence actually is to the next level. But the implications of the technology described in this book are more than philosophical. The implications of this revolution for business in our new economy and for satisfaction in our daily lives are simply staggering.

Noriaki Horiuchi

Kosheleva, Olga, Kreinovich, Vladik

Everyone talks about the need for Explainable AI -- when, to supplement a long difficult-to-understand sequence of computational steps leading to AI's decision, we are looking for a shorter and understandable more-informal explanation for this decision. In this paper, we argue that this need is a particular case of what we call Explainable Mathematics -- when we want to supplement a long sequence of arguments and/or computations with a shorter and understandable more-informal explanation. Important instances of Explainable Mathematics are Yuri Gurevich's Quizani dialogs that help explain complex results from theoretical computer science and physicists' more-informal explanations of complex physical phenomena. We explain that in the physics' case, since -- according to most physicists -- all physical theories are approximate, the use of approximate more-informal methods often makes more sense that the use of rigorous methods that implicitly assume that the current theories are absolute correct. We then apply this argument to one of the common uses of physics in theory of computation -- that limitation by the speed of light limits the computation speed. Specifically, we show that quantum space-time ideas potentially allow computations at the micro-level speed of light which can be higher than its usual macro-level value. This potential increase in possible communication speed can speed up computations.