MURAL - Maynooth University Research Archive Library



    Optical Computing


    Woods, Damien and Naughton, Thomas J. (2008) Optical Computing. In: CDMTCS Research Report Series. Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, pp. 307-330.

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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: Book Section
    Additional Information: This preprint appears in CDMTCS-327, the pre-proceedings of the Physics and Computation (Renaissance) International Workshop Vienna, Austria, August 25-28, 2008
    Keywords: optical computing; architectures; optical devices;
    Academic Unit: Faculty of Science and Engineering > Computer Science
    Item ID: 8457
    Depositing User: Thomas Naughton
    Date Deposited: 13 Jul 2017 16:24
    Publisher: Centre for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science
    Refereed: Yes
    Funders: Junta de Andalucia, European Commission Framework Programme 6
    URI:
      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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