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This Defense Intelligence Reference Document from the Defense Intelligence Agency, dated 10 December 2010, is one of a series of advanced technology reports produced in FY 2010 under the Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications (AAWSA) Program. It reviews quantum computing technologies and DNA-based molecular computing for onboard supercomputing on future spacecraft. It forecasts ion-trap quantum computers within 10 years, simple DNA tile computing within 20 years, and self-repairing DNA computers on a 40-year horizon.
“Nature”17 pages
UNCLASSIFIED//f8R: 8ffllil.t.k Wfili 8HkY temperature, some materials such as copper form a lattice that allows electrons to pair and flow as a bosonic charged (2e) particle. The components of superconducting circuits can be fabricated with current technology; however, decoherence times are limited to several microseconds maximum due to the large size (100 micrometers) of the circuit elements and thus large number of charge carriers in a qubit device (~10 10). Additionally, the current qubit device designs only operate at the scale of !O's of mK. Superconducting elements, specifically Josephson junctions, may play a role in hybrid designs such as the distributed ion traps of Haffner (81), but are currently not seen as a stand-alone technology for quantum computation. DNA-BASED DESIGNS FOR MOLECULAR COMPUTERS While traditional silicon-based circuits reach their fundamental atomic limitation, researchers search for alternative mediums for computation. The most logical solution to overcome this restriction in silicon-based integrated circuit architectures resides within our own bodies, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). Living organisms also carry out complex physical processes under the direction of digital information. Biochemical reactions and ultimately an entire organism's operation are ruled by instructions stored in its genome, encoded in sequences of nucleic acids. When the workings of bimolecular machines inside cells that process DNA and RNA are compared to Turing's machine, striking similarities emerge: both systems process information stored in a string of symbols taken from a fixed alphabet, and both operate by moving step by step along those strings, modifying or adding symbols according to a given set of rules. Set strand ( ·open' \ Waste \ ( 'Closed' Unset strand Figure 9. A DNA nanomachine driven by repeated sequential addition of DNA control strands (82}. DNA Background Watson and Crick may have never realized the full potential of the double helical structure they identified nearly 60 years ago, (83) for little was known about this amazing molecule that harnesses life. Biochemists in the late nineteenth century had found that these nucleic acids, long-chain polymers of nucleotides, were made up of sugar, phosphoric acid, and 23 UNCLASSIFIED/ ,'P81t 8Pl'l!IJIIL i,9r: Slit I'
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Report, from the dia collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is under it. 54 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.