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Brains, of course, are not general purpose computers of the sort we're used to, but at least much of what they do can be described as computation, done very efficiently, at least in power usage.

Eh? Well, provide a ref for who thinks this is computronium of course but... aside from that...

... You can imagine a turing machine quite easily using nothing but your brain, so human brains are quite turing complete (and thus general purpose).

Or am I missing something?

80.126.238.189 04:06, 9 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

There's some interesting stuff on using Rydberg atoms (or similar) as data storage units, but with the requirement that you have them trapped and isolated. Aren't fullerenes excellent atomic traps? As far as I know they can confine and isolate atoms for indefinite (1000+ years) amounts of time, and due to their small size and relatively cheap (compared to, say, a large magnetic ion trap to which the particles would be extremely sensitive) processing would be ideal for that application. AeoniosHaplo 21:00, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

They can, but Rydberg atoms are much larger than fullerene molecules (the electron in the Rydberg state is far enough away from the nucleus to almost behave classically). The trapping applications I'd heard about were for non-excited trapped atoms. --Christopher Thomas 21:50, 17 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Really, computronium is a thought experiment. In practice, it just means "a scalable computing system that is pushing up against the limits of engineering". The technology, the efficiency, the processing speed of a node, the communication speed and geometry, these are all wide open. There's a consensus that computronium is made up of individual self-sustaining nodes that can be linked together to an arbitrary degree. You don't need to know whether the individual nodes are scarily fast, or slow as neurons but you can build lots of them cheaply, or anything in between. You don't need to know if they're electronic, positronic, quantum, classical, nanotechnological, made of drexler sliding carbon rods or DNA. A Beowulf cluster of raspberry PIs is computronium, just not very excitingly fast. A brain is a computronium node, just one with laughably slow communications. It's just "OK, we've got this stuff that computes, and it's good enough to do whatever computing we need to do, what do we make of it". All the rest of the matrioshka brains and accelerandos and permutation cities comes out of that. -- Resuna (talk) 15:24, 8 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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Si49F2 can reconstitute matter, which is somewhat like the description in this article. It is 20 dimensional, a 22-bit computer, and processes Michaelsonian Hebraic symbologies. One molecule of this substance incorporates Unix-like OS (Operating System: see Unix) - both kernel and init-function - with about 57GB of steady-state memory. It, albeit asynchronously, can compute in amorphous form. It is, therefore, a kind of computronium. It is an iridescent purple rock. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.216.161.101 (talk) 19:48, 29 January 2019 (UTC)[reply]

I would like a source Lilyrneh (talk) 02:02, 24 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]