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Bringing Quantum Chips To The Assembly Line

Posted by timothy on from the nanotech dept.

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 ...

5 of 56 comments (clear)

  1. So I guess.... by Masem · · Score: 5
    We no longer can say "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these", because it will now be possible actually *have* a Beowulf cluster of these?

    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:
  2. We must ban Mac OS from this technology! by Tumbleweed · · Score: 5

    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!

  3. Uh Oh. by Monthenor · · Score: 5

    So I can know the speed of my computer or which process is running...but not both?
    ------------------------

    --
    Co-founder of GerbilMechs
  4. People don't seem to get quantum computing by Gregoyle · · Score: 5
    IANAPhysicist (at least not yet), but there are a lot of things that people, like the one who wrote this article, do not understand about quantum computing.

    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."

  5. Re:Quantum Programming by Salsaman · · Score: 5
    You mean:

    if (true) printf("true\n");

    else if (false) printf("false\n");

    else printf("I am a quantum computer !\n");