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A Programming Language for Quantum Computers

There is also a good, comprehensive website at

OpenQubit

but it seems to be in need of a new maintainer.

My understanding is that quantum computer simulators allow one to mimic the output of a quantum computer, but without the time speed-up that real quantum hardware would provide. So algorithms can be tested out, slowly, even before powerful quantum hardware is developed. I suspect some problems can also be better expressed in a quantum computing language and would therefore be solved more easily even on classical hardware.

On the subject of simulating quantum physics on classical hardware, in the book The Feynman Processor and in Feynman's own papers it is stated that a classical computer can never perfectly simulate quantum physics. But from the evidence they give it seems merely impractical, not impossible. There can be a huge penalty in the number of steps and time required but no clear reason why a simple quantum physics system could not be perfectly simulated on a powerful classical computer. Anyone have any insight on this problem?

AlpineR

http://www.openqubit.org/index.shtml

Sounds alot like what these guys need to get a quantum computer working. Of course, how do you backup a quantum computer? As soon as you try you compress the wave function of the data and *poof* no more data. Of course, if you're content to never look at your data, it will remain in a perfect state..... =)

You have it all wrong. Quantum computing does not allow you to 'try everytyhing at once' but rather to use the superposition principle indirectly to solve certain well defined problems. For example, we cannot just 'try all the factors' to factor a number, but must use Shor's algorithm which involves finding this period of a certain function and then using that indirectly to factor the number. Thus quantum computing applications will be very limited. It's not at all as easy as it looks. For more info check out OpenQubit

Unfortunately openqubit.org is nothing but a "coming soon" sign. :( While we're waiting for that to open up we can go to www.qubit.org, particularily the "Introductions & Tutorials" page.