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Publisher Summary This chapter discusses the occasion of JvN's 100th Birthday that was organized by scientific community on 28 December 2003. On this occasion, his achievements as an outstanding mathematician and creator of game theory are reminded, but even more that he laid the very conceptional foundations of the digital computer. The exponential growth of the power of microchips, every 18 months, the integration density of transistors on the chips is doubling is steering, the also exponential growth of computer power. The top computers have surpassed the teraflops level by far, at present, targeting toward 100 teraflops or even petaflops. The computer has become ubiquitous, and protagonists of robotics, and artificial intelligence are tempted to attribute to it omnipotent capabilities that will lead to autonomous “humanoids.” The predictions of the semiconductor industry tell that “Moore's law” describing the exponential evolution in microelectronics might remain valid for other 10 to 15 years. Beyond Moore's law, quantum effects will definitely end the orderly functioning of “classical” circuits. Experimentalists work on different physical concepts to realize quantum computation, for instance, quantum dots, trapped ions, superconducting devices, and NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance) technology have been shown to provide the principles and the technology to build quantum computers. |
