Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
P
OSSIBILITY OF
H
IGH
P
ERFORMANCE
C
OMPUTATION IN
B
IOLOGICAL
B
RAINS
Takaaki Musha
Technical Research and Development Institute, MOD, Japan
A
BSTRACT
The quantum processor is considered to have the possibility to overcome
fundamental limitations of conventional processors, but the influence of energy cost due
to the uncertainty principle may prevent speeding up the quantum computation. On the
basis of the theorem that the evanescent photon is a superluminal particle, the possibility
of a high performance computer system compared with conventional silicon processors
has been studied and it can be shown that the energy loss required for computation is
much lower than the conventional processor by utilizing evanescent photons. From the
high performance capabilities of quantum computation, there are many researchers for
explaining the higher performance of human brains, including consciousness. R.Penrose
and S.Hameroff have proposed the idea that the human brain can attain high efficient
quantum computation by functioning of microtubular structure of neurons. But Tegmark
estimated the duration of coherence to be on the order of 10
-13
seconds, which is far
smaller than the one tenth of a second associated with consciousness and it is normally
expected that any macroscopic coherence of a quantum state in a warm wet brain to be
destroyed almost immediately. Hagen, Hameroff, and Tuszynski have claimed that
Tegmark's assumptions should be amended, but the need to maintain macroscopic
quantum coherence in a warm wet brain is certainly a serious problem for the Penrose-
Hameroff model. From the assumption that the evanescent photon is a superluminal
particle, it can be also shown that the microtubule in biological brain can achieve large
quantum bits computation compared with the conventional silicon processors, which
leads to the high performance computation compared with the conventional processors
even at the room temperature, contrary to the Tegmark's calculation result. If this
mechanism is true for the brain function, we can obtain the possibility to realize much
more efficient computer systems like a human brain by utilizing superluminal evanescent
photons for quantum processors.
