Slashdot Mirror
Bringing Quantum Chips To The Assembly Line
nutty_kong writes: "The National Science Foundation apparently is helping to develop a reliable way to manufacture quantum chips. So far, there has been experiments but no reliable way to reproduce or in other words manufacture the devices." Part of the problem with the promised magic of quantum computing is that component manufacture is often custom to each project, and difficult to repeat. Eventually, they'll hit RadioShack though ...
isn't it "I can almost smell the 30/60"?
Wouldn't by quantum entanglemnet every chip be a beowulf cluster in itself?
--
Quantum Computing: Putting the N in NP!
Maybe Digital Convergence can jump on this and give away QuantumCues. All they ask is for a little processor time, otherwise its for you to play with.
Asked for comment, Sun's Scott McNealy responeded: 'WE put the "dot" in quantum-dot nanoswitches!'
You are correct. I didn't mean to imply that it was "hard" as in NP, but only that it is generally considered a "hard" problem by the mathematical community. The fastest known algorithm is exponential, and it looks to stay that way for at least quite some time.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
Tiny 'big bang' performs quantum computations
Using a computer model that "explodes" a single particle into an infinite regress of quantum waves, University of Arkansas physics professor William Harter has demonstrated a new approach to quantum computation. "Our model reveals a fractal interference pattern emerging from quantum waves -- after what we are calling a tiny big bang -- that can perform useful calculations, such as calculating all the prime factors of any size integer," said Harter.
Like I said, this could be difficult to manufacture into a chip.
;-)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
They might end up at RadioShack. Or anywhere else in the universe. Or nowhere at all. Or everywhere at once. Damn "probability wave" !
Sig (appended to the end of comments I post, 54 chars)
Yeah, right between the cm cubed terabyte of storage and the ream of colour electronic paper.
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
Aunt Millie will buy a quantum computer at Radio Shack and use it for sending e-mail.
Bush's education improvements were
Hate to burst the bubble here, but before the hype gets totally out of control, I think someone should mention that at the moment the best quantum computer has 2 bits, but will probably be scaled up soon. There are claims about one demonstration of 7 bits using NMR, but in my field the conventional wisdom is that this one doesn't do true quantum computing, and anyway it's not scalable. Unfortunately, the only working, 2-bit quantum computer, currently requires probably 1/2million$ of equipment to run, as it uses trapped ions in a very complex electrostatic trap inside a vacuum system. So far nobody even has a very promising proposal for doing quantum computing in a solid-state (i.e., really manufacturable) device, as far as I know, although when grant money beckons, people become intensely optimistic. On top of all this is the final point that there are only basically 2 known applications at which quantum computers would outperform classical computers: code breaking (remeber BB will have this technology long befor you do!) and the simulation of quantum mechanics problems (almost a redundant application, really.) The single-molecule, classical computer actually holds out vastly more promise for the industry.
PEACE LOVE FREEDOM ANARCHY
Yes, and then if you feed it the improbibility ratio of a truely infinitely quantum processor you can create that out of thin air. You'll win the award for amazing cleverness and probably get lynched by all the other CS geeks who finaly realise that the one thing they can't stand is a smartass.
Or is that tea?
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
I can see it now.. Windows Quantum. Able to function correctly AND crash an infinite number of times simultainously so fast you won't even know it.... Hope my old DOS programs still run...
"Every computer Crashes, cause Every OS Sucks.. Everything since Apple/DOS..Just a bunch of crap"
if (true) ... no, I mean if (false) ... no, I really mean if (true).....
Damn! It keeps changing every time I measure it....
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
One useful measure of a quantum computer is how many qubits you can maintain in a quantum mechanical superposition. The problem is called decoherence. The more qubits you try to link together the more likely they are to decohere from their pure quantum mechanical state, and behave more like a macroscopic object, in this case, say a regular old transistor bit.
That's what "unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption" is.
Luckily, this looks like it will be possible much sooner than actual quantum factorization engines. It only requires one qubit, and has been successfully demonstrated. Hopefully someone will develop a method that does not need line of sight photon transfers. Although, when I think about it, that's integral to the encryption method.
The whole thing with quantum cryptography is that it virtually eliminates the value of mathmatically based encryption algorithms. There is no present algorithm using superposition to generate even stronger encryption, and I'm not even sure if it would be mathematically possible to develop one.
The only safe encryption methods will be the ones that use the properties of the quanta themselves. Hopefully someone will find a way to finagle a PKI out of that, or we go back into the Dark Ages of encryption.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
So far one the most interesting use of quatum devices I have seen involved taking a wafer with an esentially random distribution of quatum dots and then using a neural net type arrangement to learn how to control it to get useful results out. I can't remember all the details but I think the setup was part of an optical light switching system.
I thought it was an interesting way of getting use out of devices that we are still not able to produce with accuracy.
Eventually, they'll hit RadioShack
Oh, I can just see it now, hanging there on a swinging-door display, alongside all the other parts: RS part number 14-2847, in a little blue blister pack labeled 7404 TTL Hex Quantum Gate. On the back of the cardboard is printed a pinout and a Feynman diagram. I can almost smell the 60/40 now...
Radio Shack: You've got questions, we've got blank stares.
--Jim
A physics teacher back at my high school always used to blame any electrical experiments that he had problems with on stray capacitance - in 20 years time I'm looking forward to excusing segmentation faults as being an unavoidable result of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle (and not just me counting from 1 instead of 0).
Does this mean we can start to look forward to the death of the Hert as a "measure" of chip speed? Since the ability of a chip to spin off quantum processes rather than vibrate will become it's dominant characteristic I'm thinking we might start to see chips measured by a different benchmark...
Not that Hertz are really that terribly usefull or anything.... but they do give an idea, however vauge. Any thoughts on what new buzzword we'll be dealing with?
This has been another useless post from....
Killfile(TGK)
No trees were killed in the creation of this post. However, many electrons were inconvenienced.
Damn, those /. trollers are going to have to find a new tag line... :-)
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
If Mac OS is ever ported to this technology, the conflict between it and Jobs' "Reality Distortion Field" may be enough to destroy the entire multiverse. Look at the bones, man!
So I can know the speed of my computer or which process is running...but not both?
------------------------
Co-founder of GerbilMechs
First off; the "size" doesn't really matter. A lot of the article focuses on how the qubits will be XYZ times smaller than modern implementations of regular bits. Well, of course they will be!! The whole thing about quantum computing is that it uses the properties of a single atom; if the infrasturucture were much bigger than that it wouldn't make much sense.
Almost as an aside, the article mentions the superpositioning of 1 and 0. This is HUGE . So what, you might say, what difference is it if a bit can hold a little more information? Think of this: Take 8 qubits. If these were normal bits they would be able to hold any one number from 00 to FF. When you have 8 qubits, they can hold ALL the numbers from 00 to FF. So you can run algorithms on all the numbers at once rather than just one at a time.
Of course, it can only return one number at a time (meaning it might contain both numbers, but when you test to see which number it holds it will return one or the other). There are ways to get around this, though. In the mid 90s Peter Shor at IBM developed an algorithm for prime factorization in polynomial time using qubits. Normally prime factorization is an exponential (or "hard") problem. RSA and almost all widely used public encryption algorithms rely on prime factorization for their security. This is important stuff.
Some proposals for quantum computing use the "tunneling" method described in the article, but my hopes are with the NMR crowd. This seems the most promising using current technology.
And as far as being able to buy this stuff at Radio Shack; I would be very surprised if that happened any time remotely soon. Think about it this way: unbreakable (by the laws of physics) encryption, and virtually instantaneous cracking of encryption, just for starters? Hmm, I can't think of any super-powerful world governments who would want to get their hands on that and keep it away from anyone else...
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."