Woods, Damien and Naughton, Thomas J. (2009) Optical computing. Applied Mathematics and Computation, 215 (4). pp. 1417-1430. ISSN 0096-3003

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Abstract

We consider optical computers that encode data using images and compute by transforming such images. We give an overview of a number of such optical computing architectures, including descriptions of the type of hardware commonly used in optical computing, as well as some of the computational efficiencies of optical devices. We go on to discuss optical computing from the point of view of computational complexity theory, with the aim of putting some old, and some very recent, results in context. Finally, we focus on a particular optical model of computation called the continuous space machine. We describe some results for this model including characterisations in terms of well-known complexity classes.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Preprint version of original published article. Original article available at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/00963003 (doi:10.1016/j.amc.2009.04.061). DW acknowledges support from Junta de Andalucıa grant TIC-581. TN acknowledges support from the European Commission Framework Programme 6 through a Marie Curie Intra-European Fellowship.
Keywords:	Optical computing; Optical algorithm; Optical implementation; Continuous space machine; Computational complexity; Fourier transform; Search algorithm;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science
Item ID:	2820
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amc.2009.04.061
Depositing User:	CS Editor
Date Deposited:	09 Nov 2011 15:30
Journal or Publication Title:	Applied Mathematics and Computation
Publisher:	Elsevier
Refereed:	No
Funders:	Junta de Andalucıa, European Commission Framework Programme 6
URI:	http://www.journals.elsevier.com/applied...
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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