MIT And HP Announce Joint Quantum Computer Project

MetaCow writes: "CNN is running this article which describes a joint effort between MIT and HP to build a quantum computer. Nothing expected any time soon, though: 'Quantum computing research is farsighted, and it may take 10 years to develop a fully operational quantum computer ...'"

Comments

Correction needed...

[RyanFenton]

Alright, a little 'bit picky', but

"While the classical bit can store any number between 0 and 255 on each of its eight bytes, ..."

Byte and bit should be reversed in this sentence fragment.

:^)

Ryan Fenton

Re:Correction needed...

[IvyMike]

Actually, that still doesn't make sense. Perhaps, "While the classical byte can store any number between 0 and 255 using all of its eight bits"?

Re:Correction needed...

[sharkey]

Well, that's probably why they are having problems reading the information back, as mentionad farther on in the article. If MIT and HP cannot figure the difference between bits and bytes, then they are simply providing a demonstration of the adage, "Crap in, crap out".

On the other hand, the "article-typer" probably heard the words "quantum" and "qubit" and decided to write an article. His research probably consisted of noticing that his 56 kilobit modem was getting transfer rates of ~5 kilobytes on Win9x reported connection of ~40kps, and deduced that bits are bigger than bytes.

Following this, he decided that he was an Authority (search for False Authority on /. when the indexes have been rebuilt) on conned a PHB editor with a deluge of buzzwords into letting him publicy insert his foot into his mouth.

Re:Correction needed...

[Audent]

I know the reporter who wrote the story and this is the un-subbed version... She's added in this paragraph instead

Quantum computing uses the properties of quantum physics to perform calculations. The basic unit of computation used is the qubit, or quantum bit. Unlike classical bits the qubit is not just 0 to 1 but is in a superposition of both. In other words, it is both on and off at the same time.

While the classical digital byte can store any number between 0 and 255 using all of its eight bits, it can only represent one of those numbers at a time. But a qubyte can be all of the numbers between 0 and 255 simultaneously.

This allows much more information to be stored on a quantum bit than a classical bit, and allows massively parallel processing on a quantum scale. One calculation can give the answer for all the numbers on the byte at the same time, according to an explanation posted on the MIT Web site. In other words, for each clock cycle a quantum computer could perform 256 calculations in the same time a digital computer can perform just one.

CNN have the older version up... the correction should be along shortly.

Re:Correction needed...

[Gillian]

Okay - I wrote the stupid thing. And the whole sentence got mangled. There's a correction been posted on the IDG site but it hasn't got through to CNN yet.. Not MIT's fault - mine. D'oh.

About time

[alen]

I was getting tired of Geforce2 quality graphics.

They may or may not succeed.

[SpanishInquisition]

Someone will have to observe them to get a definitive answer.

Re:They may or may not succeed.

[Anonymous Coward]

but what does one do with a whole bunch of dead cats in a server farm ?

anyone else find it odd?

[TechnoVooDooDaddy]

That it's going to take this EXACTLY the same amount of time as it will for HAL to develop into maturity?????

Mr. Clarke was 10 years off perhaps? HMMMMMM

time frame

[ritlane]

<i>and it may take 10 years to develop a fully operational quantum computer ...</i>
<br><br>
Which means the NSA should be turning thiers on, rights..... about...... <b>now</b>

Re:time frame

[Anonymous Coward]

ha ha you dipshit.

Re:time frame

[dragons_flight]

I actually got to tour the main NSA facility devoted to quantum computing research as a potential employee. (If they have more than one major lab working on this, no one told us).

They actually don't have anything working right now, beyond what many public labs have. What they do have however is an essentially inexhaustible supply of money being thrown at this. They can hire the best talent and get any equipment they want.

The NSA isn't there yet, but they sure do want to be first.

Re:time frame

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, sure. I'll bet "potential" employees of the NSA get tours of quantum computing labs all the time.

Re:time frame

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah no shit, this guy obviously isn't the brightest bulb in the closet, even if he did get a tour of something they toted as their facility devoted to quantum computing research (yeah, right) its pretty clear that if They can hire the best talent and get any equipment they want. its big wonder they didn't hire him...

Plus according to a few friends of mine who are contractors and security experts who work within DARPA and the NSA, the NSA is more like 15-20 years ahead of the corporate and educational sectors as far as most techno-vapor goes. and totally, like duh... how else would they be able to sort out all the info from their underwater optical splices, unless they already had quantum abilities... plus they just finished grafting on metal skin last night... blah blah blah

What?

[steveo777]

While the classical bit can store any number between 0 and 255 on each of its eight bytes, the qubit can store all the numbers between 0 and 255 on a byte of eight qubits.

Please tell me this is just bad grammer. I mean, Doesn't this sound like you need 64 bits to make 255 on a binary computer (which we all know is false) and that somehow these "magical" quantum computers can do it in only 8 bits?...

Imagine the compression we could have by not using a whole byte to store a bit of information...

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

The first part is just a mistake, as was pointed out by an earlier post.

The second part I took to mean that a qbyte of 8 qbits could represent all the numbers from 0-255 *at the same time*.

In essence it would work much like a bit mask, but could do with 8 qbits what would normally take 255 bits.

This of course is the interesting part of quantum computers.

It will be over soon

[The IPO Guy]

As soon as VA Linux goes out of business and Slashdot is shut down.

nice

[Anonymous Coward]

Quantum computing research is farsighted, and it may take 10 years to develop a fully operational quantum computer

That's great! That means it'll be ready just in time for the completion of the GNU/HURD operating system. Maybe they can do a port. Nice.

/me ducks as things are thrown at him from all angles

Some real info...article lacks it

[akiaki007]

Quite a lame article, IMO.

The article fails to make any real points. It's merely a PR article for HP and MIT.

Unlike classical bits, the qubit can be not just 0 or 1 but a superposition of both, in differing proportions.

Um...wrong. The qubit can be in the 0 or 1 state, but can also be both at the same time, and have varying rotations. Which is what makes it immpossible for us to decode them. It is the multiple state position that is what is interesting to us, and what does the parallel computing. We just don't know how to utilize it just yet. There have been various articles. Quibit.org is a great place to start reading up on this stuff. The IBM Almaden has a nice article that will actually tell you something useful.

Re:Some real info...article lacks it

[Anonymous Coward]

In each quantum computing news article, the reporter tries to write a one-paragraph explanation of quantum computing that their average reader can understand. They always fail. These wanna-be science reporters should just give up and say nothing.

Re:Some real info...article lacks it

[Anonymous Coward]

The qubit can be in the 0 or 1 state, but can also be both at the same time, and have varying rotations.

The section of the article that you quoted says the same thing that you are struggling to say, but more accurately and precisely. Let me spell it out for you:

Really, the system can only be in one state, just like a vector can point in only one direction. The "0" and "1" states are a complete orthonormal basis of the space of possible states. They are analogous to the "x" and "y" axes of a real two dimensional vector space.

You can build a vector out of .707x + .707y, and you can say, if you like, that it is part "x" and part "y" at the same time. This is what is meant by a superposition of states

There are a few additonal details in the mathematics of our quantum mechanical two-state system. It is a complex vector space, so you can have a coefficient like 0.707i for example. But the "length" (Hermitian inner product with itself) of the state is unimportant, so we normalize the lengths to unity. Also the overall phase is arbitrary. So we are left with two real degrees of freedom. This is what the article means by "differing proportions." The proportion is a complex number that determines the state.

The "0" and "1" states are eigenstates of a particular hermitian operator, and hence are orthogonal. "Measuring" the system using this operator gives a single result equal to the (real) eigenvalues of a basis state. With repeated measurements, the statistical frequency of each particular result is in proportion to the square magnitude of the (complex) coefficient of the corresponding eigenstate. Basically, the system collapses to an eigenstate of the measurement.

Of course, none of this explains the computational power of quantum computing, one part of which is due to the way states add to make other states. If we make a system out of two (coherent) qubits, the appropriate description is a tensor product of the two separate spaces, so we get a four dimensional complex vector space to work with. With n qubits, the space gets big very quickly.

Anyway, what I really wanted to say is: you are wrong, smarty pants. Ha ha ha! So there.

Re:Some real info...article lacks it

[internic]

I also thought the article lacked a lot of relevent info and, what's more, said some things that were just wrong. A few additional pieces of information that might be of interest:

A quantum computer is not simply faster than a classical computer

Quantum computers use a different set of fundemental logical operations, which allow them to do all the things a classical computer (Turing machine) can, plus it allows some other operations to be done using the superpositions or entaglement of states. This means there are some problems for which fundementally different algerithms can be written to do it much faster, in polynomial time as apposed to exponential; however, there are just a few of these. There's no reason to think it will be faster for everything. For most tasks odds are its algerithms will be just as efficient as a classical computer. In addition, its logic operations will likely be slower meaning it may well be slower for the vast majority of tasks. So, don't expect a desktop QC in 20 years, it would probably be used only for specialized computational tasks for the forseable future.

A quantum computer is not right around the corner

Though the article gives little detail, the computer they're talking about making in 10 years will probably not be amongst the most powerful in the world when it is turned on. Odds are it will be more like the size of house with the power of a pocket calculator, old school mainframe style. This is due to the difficulties they mention. This is not really made very clear in the article, but the difficulties they face aren't just practical. Even theoretical calculations suggest that it's not feasible with currently theorized techniques to make a quantum computer more than about 100 qubits, due to decoherence and computer control factors. Quoth one paper, "...the absolute limit on what any practical NMR comptuer can handle remains well below 100 bits" (Cory et al., Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 94, 1997). I've read similar estimates for all forms of quantum computation currently in the works. It seems that it takes a computer with on the order of 500 to 1000s of qubits before it actually becomes more useful than a classical computer. This should not be hard to imagine. What do you think you could do with a computer that could only hold 100 bits of memory at a time? The point is that in ten years, we won't be seeing any supercomputer.

Quantum computers are not the next step in miniturization

The article says that we're reaching the limit of classical computation and suggest that quantum computers are the next step. It is true that Feynmann suggested in his original paper on the topic in 1983 that when computer technology reached the atomic scale then quantum mechanics would have to become part of computation, but quantum computers as they are talked about today have little to do with miniturization. In many of the schemes, such as atom traps quantum computers, the memory and computation elements (when control devices are included) are much larger than those for classical computers. This can also be said for RF-Squids and quantum dots. In short, the proimise of quantum computers has nothing to do with miniturization, it has to do with the fact that they can perform fundementally different algerithms.

All that being said, I think it is a good that they're doing this research, and I do think that quantum computers will likely someday be useful, both as computers and as tools for researching quantum mechanics further. I am not saying I don't think they'll work, simply that the article seems to suggest a picture which is overly optimistic. However, with the great promise they hold, I don't think we can afford not to do research like this.

Ah Richard P Feynman...

[kypper]

The brilliant physicist who first visualized this concept.

His biography is quite the read. You can get it here.

Re:Ah Richard P Feynman...

[Anonymous Coward]

You use Linux, right?

Re:Ah Richard P Feynman...

[Anonymous Coward]

Heh, heh, heh... surely you're joking??!??
Hilarious book

only $25 million in funds?

[garcia]

The article mentions only $25 million. For a project that *could* take over the estimated 10 years it just seems small...

With the results that a Quantum computer could generate I cannot believe that there isn't a larger sum designated for this project...

Re:only $25 million in funds?

[Anonymous Coward]

years 0-7: pizza, beer, sleep till 3pm every day.
year 8: go see what CMU has done with Quantum computing
year 9: reimplement & call press conferences to upstage CMU, cuz we're MIT dammit

This is progress?

[Glock27]

It seems that a quantum computer could calculate every possible double answer simultaneously, given a 64 qubit processor. The only problem is that, if the answer is read out, its guaranteed to be wrong! ;-)

This is something of a drop from conventional computer performance, in which the answer is merely often wrong.

Somehow I think this article 'dumbed things down' a bit too much...

186,282 mi/s...not just a good idea, its the law!

Re:This is progress?

[UberLame]

Err, I thought it was only wrong if you tried to read the answer before the computation was done.

Re:This is progress?

[Alien54]

I can see that, some years in the future, that the technical jargon will be as dated for Star Trek as much as the technical data is in a show like the old Max Headroom (from the late 80s).

Max Headroom was brilliant, and totally did not see the advent of the Internet. They envisioned a world where TV was mandatory, and everything was run by TV conglomerates.

They missed the internet entirely. But aside from that, they were not all that bad.

- - -
Radio Free Nation
is a news site based on Slash Code
"If You have a Story, We have a Soap Box"
- - -

Quantum computing

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, my school, Calif. State U. Fullerton, just added an upper division course in Quantum Computers. And they don't offer a single class in: Perl, CGI, the c++ standard template library, MFC, Com, corba or xml.

Quick, somebody call the FBI

[chrisatslashdot]

These evil crackers are trying to circumvent factor based encryption, a copyright protection scheme. Lock 'em up

uhm... what?

[pergamon]

this doesn't sound right:

While the classical bit can store any number between 0 and 255 on each of its eight bytes, the qubit can store all the numbers between 0 and 255 on a byte of eight qubits. This allows much more information to be stored on a quantum bit than a classical bit...

Re:uhm... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess that NASA scientist found a new job.

Re:uhm... what?

[unitron]

Just think of the qubit as a quasi-analog device. It can be pure red or pure blue or 6 other values representing blends of red and blue in different proportions.

Of course when you look to see what color it is, the act of looking changes the color.

Re:uhm... what?

[Louis Savain]

Just think of the qubit as a quasi-analog device. It can be pure red or pure blue or 6 other values representing blends of red and blue in different proportions.

Yeah right. While no one is looking, right?

Of course when you look to see what color it is, the act of looking changes the color.

The amazing thing about quantum computing is that it only works when nobody is looking. As soon as you take a look, all the in-between values disappear into thin air. It's like saying you can jump as tall as the empire state building when nobody is looking. What ever happened to physics being an experimental science? It's looking more and more like chicken feather voodoo physics to me. But to each his own I suppose.

Re:uhm... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

What ever happened to physics being an experimental science? It's looking more and more like chicken feather voodoo physics to me.

They said the said thing about the "iron horse."

Re:uhm... what?

[unitron]

How about this? It's like stepping off of the Empire State Building. Gravity doesn't take hold until you actually notice that you're standing on air. (After all, with all those plans and schemes he came up with, Wile E. Coyote must have been at least a PhD. in theoretical physics.)

Quantum computing does have one benefit, though. At least when you look you find out whether the cat is dead or alive. :-)

Re:uhm... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's looking more and more like chicken feather voodoo physics to me

Well try to create a wormhole via experiment. Currently, you're bound to run into a few snags. Determining force due to gravity is all good and fine by experiment, but if you wanna do something incredible, something groundbreaking, you've gotta go into mathematical theory. After all, if we don't understand it, we're obviously not using it to its full potential!

Re:uhm... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Analog and Qubit representations are not the same!

Why HP?

[Ars-Fartsica]

HP has cast itself as the manufacturer of all of the disposables of computing (PCs, printers, cameras, etc.). While it is laudable for them to go after future marketspace, their R&D might be better focused on how to beat Dell at low-cost manufacturing and inventory management, seeing as this is the commodity market they have chosen to compete in.

As it stands, without some serious changes in senior management and a total overhaul of their product line, it is unlikely HP (as we know it) will see 2010....they're on the 3COM/SGI track right now.

Re:Why HP?

[Anonymous Coward]

We certainly make some low-end devices, but that's hardly where we make our money. I doubt people would consider the $30k color lasers as disposable. Perhaps the $150 inkjets the average consumer buys is. HP plays in the low-end, to be sure, but the money is made in the higher margin high-end devices and the real money is made in services. There's very little benefit to trying to beat Dell on the desktop. I'd rather see HP continue to sell Superdomes so we can invest in our labs and insure our future.

Re:Why HP?

[Newander]

Not to mention the other markets HP excells in. Namely, o-scopes, logic analyzers, etc.. HP test equipment rocks.

Re:Why HP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention the other markets HP excells in. Namely, o-scopes, logic analyzers, etc.. HP test equipment rocks.

HP spun off that segment of the business into a new and eventually company known as Agilent last year.

Re:Why HP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it would make them more money than they could sh!t :)

cracking on a whole new level.

[allknowing]

Imagine the power we will have to crack passwords when this quantum computing goes through

Re:cracking on a whole new level.

[Griton]

Imagine the Encryption/Decryption power we'll have though.

Great but....

[mattsking]

This is all nice, but:

What sort of frame rates will I be getting in Quake3?

Fnord!

Re:Great but....

[tbmaddux]

"What sort of frame rates will I be getting in Quake3?"

All of them, but of course you won't be able to see them.

Indeed.

[RyanFenton]

There should be a new law passed that all computer-related articles would have to be edited by Slashdot boards. Then it would be easy to recognize any computer-related article by it's first words - "First post!"

;^)

Ryan Fenton

Microsoft on reading data from quantum computers

[hillct]

This excerpt pretty much sums up the state of this vapor(hard)ware:

Problems arise when it comes to reading the information back. Any interactions with the environment -- including trying to read the information stored -- affect the qubits so that they change from a pure quantum state to a mixed state. This is known as decoherence and any reading taken from this state will be wrong.

Bill Gates: "Yes! This computer works perfectly. You just don't have the technology to read the result without currupting the data, but for $5 per compute cycle, Microsoft will be happy to license our proprietary qbit data reading technology to you."

--CTH

Ten years not such a long time, think of 1991

[Anonymous Coward]

Desert Storm... The Sierra Madre Earthquake in LA... Collapse of the Soviet Union... "Real Life With Jane Pauley" debuts... ugh... feeling old... never mind, the point is lost...

The Quantum Computing Swindle

[HEbGb]

This is a re-post of a fine piece by nightlight3 some months ago. I'd simply post the link, but slashdot archives aren't working. (I retrieved this from google cache).

This isn't flamebait - it's definitely a subject worthy of discussion. I, for one, have great reservations about whether this is a viable technology. This is especially important since so much money and attention is being poured into research, perhaps often without a real understanding of the basic principles. I happen to know people in Gershenfeld's lab, and know full well their tendencies to let the hype get out of hand.

Perhpas HP is spending the money as a marketing/PR effort, rather than them intending to get real work done. That would explain the press release.

So here it is; I hope nightlight3 will chime in.
- - - - -

"If one existed, a quantum computer would be extremely powerful; building one, however, is extremely challenging,"

Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."

The whole field of Quantum Computing is a mathematical abstraction (fine, as any pure math is, as long as you don't try to claim that's how the real world works). Its vital connection with the real world is based on a highly dubious (even outright absurd, according to some physicists, including Einstein) conjecture about entangled quantum states (roughly, a special kind of "mystical" non-local correlation among events) which was actually never confirmed experimentally. And without that quantum entanglement the whole field is an excercise in pure abstract math with no bearing on reality.

While there were number of claims of an "almost" confirmation of this kind of quantum correlations (the so-called Bell inequality tests), there is always a disclaimer (explicit or, in recent years, between the lines as the swindle got harder to sell), such as "provided the combined setup and detection efficiency in this situation can be made above 82%" (even though it is typically well below 1% overall in the actual experiment; the most famous of its kind, Aspect experiment from early 1980s had only 0.2% combined efficiency, while 82% is needed for actual, "loophole free" proof) or provided we assume that the undetected events follow such and such statistics, etc. The alternative explanations of those experiments (requiring no belief in mystical instant action-at-a-distance), which naturally violate those wishfull assumptions, are ignored, or ridiculed as unimportant loopholes when forced to debate the opposition, by the "mystical" faction. After all, without believing their conjecture all the magic of quantum computing, quantum cryptography, quantum teleportation, along with funding, would vanish.

For those interested in the other side of these kinds of claims, why it doesn't work and why it will never work, check the site by a reputable British physicist Trevor Marshall, who has been fighting, along with a small group of allies, the "quantum magic" school for years:

Quantum Mechanics is not a Science

Unfortunately, the vast bulk of the research funding in this area goes to the mystical faction. As long as there are fools with money, there will always be swindlers who will part the two.

For a more popular account, accessible to non-physicists, of the opposing view, you can check a site by a practical statistician (and general sceptic) Caroline Thompson:

Caroline Thompson's Physics

Re:The Quantum Computing Swindle

[Anonymous Coward]

It is an interesting subject, and it'll be fun to see it it will ever work at the larger scale.
However:

>Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."

It CAN work, it has been demonstrated for 5 atom ion trap systems at IBM! (check http://qubit.org for reference). When following the links you gave one gets the impression that quantum mechanics is some kind of mystical hypothesis, and not an established theory. People have been using quantum theory for predicting actual experimental outcomes for more 30 years now. It works incredibly well for a large number of systems, and the parts of QM used in quantum computers (interference between different states in a superposition) are definitly known, experimentally, to be true. There is no need to bring in Bells inequality here, really!

Quantum Mechanics are definitely not the final answer to all our questions, but it works incredibly well in most normal situations. If you want a relativistic theory just use the Dirac equation. There is nothing mystical about it, it's being done every day in more places than most people suspect (drug design, polymers, semi-conductor, atmospheric simulations .. ).

/knas

Re:The Quantum Computing Swindle

[Anonymous Coward]

There exists an entire sub-culture who believe in the Great Conspiracy and those who try to refute QM are no different, tilting at windmills while the rest of us get on with our lives and work with with the best available evidence. Ultimately, the anti-Non-Locality folks have to believe in a grand conspiracy of nature to make their ad hoc models even come close to reproducing the non-local correlations observed in quite a few experiments (using different systems, methodologies). We have had experiments which closed the locality loophole (Gisin, Geneva), experiments which closed the detection loopholes (Wineland, Boulder), and there are proposals to close both at the same time.

As new experiments are done, improving on the previous ones, the results merely confirm the predictions of QM, no sign of deviation from what we should expect. Not to mention that QM is the basis of electronics, which seems to work to a remarkably high degree, for a supposedly `wrong' theory. I see a parallel to the `Creation Science' debacle, where anti-evolutionists play their `argument from incredulity' card and try to poke holes into a straw man of their devising. Those rejecting the established results of QM are our latter-day Flat Earthers. I admire their ability to perform logical and factual contortions to support their untenable position.

As for the funding situation, the amount of money spent on Quantum Computation is mere loose change, just enough to keep mainly theoreticians lean and mean, with a few small scale experiments running (we're not talking SSC here). A 10 year time-line for the development of a fully functioning quantum computer is a stretch though, the technical challenges are very formidable, and it may follow the Fusion Power story. Still, the fundamental research in Quantum Information Theory is still very worthwhile in its own right, whether or not we can build a scalable quantum computer. The outlook for quantum crypto is much better, commercialised systems may come out within a 10 year horizon.

Sure, there is a lot of hype, and I cringe everytime I read a popular account of QC for all the misunderstandings promulgated, but it is a very serious research programme. Through considerations of quantum information, we may find a way of unifying the two great pillars of modern physics, GR and QM.

Re:The Quantum Computing Swindle

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice try, but no where near as good as the "BSD is dying" one.

You need to work on the numbers some more, and get a better punchline.

Re:The Quantum Computing Swindle

[Anonymous Coward]

just for some info on that whole "Bell inequality swindle," read "Science" from february (which of the 3, i'm not sure. Like their house ads say, I need my own copies), physicists have closed up the problem with the 82% efficiency.
so there.
pbbrtt.

DMCA vs Quantum computers

[roman_mir]

I wonder if DMCA would render building, selling and using such machines illegal, since quantum computers can be used to compute securitykeys for any encryption algorithms in a feasible amount of time?

Re:DMCA vs Quantum computers

[Insount]

There's currently no evidence that quantum computers can break all encryption schemes.
See item 1 in my previous comment.

Re:DMCA vs Quantum computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes that is exactly what it will do, right after it makes the sky fall.

Interesting Implications

[PureFiction]

Here are a few things that quantum computers (when fully realized and sufficiently powerful) may bring with them in the future:

1. No more encryption. Quantum computers can crack block ciphers with ease, as well as assymetric public key cyphers. Bigger keys? Just use more qubits. Hmm... can anonymous networks (MixMaster, Freenet, Publius, etc...) exist without encryption? Can banking exist without encryption? How about online transactions in general?

2. Uber compression. Everything digital occurs in the Pi sequence somewhere right? Well, quantum computers might be able find that offset and length within Pi, LCG's, or any other kind of sequence.

Imagine downloading a 4 hour DIVX using 20 bytes. 4b sequence ID, 8b offset, 8b length. That is the same length as an IP header...

3. Massive optimization. Remember all those NP-complete problems you learned in comp. sci. ? No more simmulated annealing, genetic algorithm, guesstimation methods. Qubits can find the optimal solution instantly. No more intense calculations for hours/days to find meager 'near' optimal solutions. P.S. NP-complete type problems shows up in almost every complex system in every field / domain.

So what are the implications of this kind of computing becoming available in ten years? It's a wonder we dont hear more about this when reading about quantum computers. The effect they will have when available is almost more interesting than the implementation ;)

Re:Interesting Implications

[MindStalker]

About the PI think, most combinations are most likly to be found at a numerically higher offset, than the number itself is, therefor making the total bigger ;(

Re:Interesting Implications

[Rumagent]

You are forgetting that same technology that allows you to break all conventional encryption, also you to create imbreakable encryption - Not only that, but it will also be impossible to intercept a quantum coded message, without alerting the reciever.

The only problem is that very few people have a quantum computer:)

Re:Interesting Implications

[geomcbay]

You are correct. The offset into PI will be larger than the data segment you are trying to find in it in all but the most trivial cases. Simple information theory dictates this.

If it weren't the case, people would already be using PI as a compressions scheme on not-so-large data -- sure it might take days/weeks/months to find the encoding of a specific piece of data in PI, but considering how fast it would uncompress (if they offset were really significantly smaller than the data it was compressing, which wouldn't be often) it would be worth it for some uses.

Re:Interesting Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

Idiot.

1. No more encryption. Quantum computers can crack block ciphers with ease, as well as assymetric public key cyphers. Bigger keys? Just use more qubits. Hmm... can anonymous networks (MixMaster, Freenet, Publius, etc...) exist without encryption? Can banking exist without encryption? How about online transactions in general?

WRONG. If qubits negate the usefulness of all our current cryptographic methods, they can just as easily be used to create methods exceeding their own effectiveness. I call this the "We're going to need a bigger boat" conundrum, and you can quote me on that.

2. Uber compression. Everything digital occurs in the Pi sequence somewhere right? Well, quantum computers might be able find that offset and length within Pi, LCG's, or any other kind of sequence.

Imagine downloading a 4 hour DIVX using 20 bytes. 4b sequence ID, 8b offset, 8b length. That is the same length as an IP header...

This is some idiot idea someone floated in the past on the articles on Pi, and it just isn't true. According to my rough calculations, the odds that a given sequence of length n occurs within pi at a position less than said sequence's ordinal value are exactly jack fucken shit. There's no more hope in basing a new form of compression on this than basing compression on flipping over tarot cards.

3. Massive optimization. Remember all those NP-complete problems you learned in comp. sci. ? No more simmulated annealing, genetic algorithm, guesstimation methods. Qubits can find the optimal solution instantly. No more intense calculations for hours/days to find meager 'near' optimal solutions. P.S. NP-complete type problems shows up in almost every complex system in every field / domain.

Designing the pattern of qubits necessary to compute a NP-complete problem will be a NP-complete problem.

So what are the implications of this kind of computing becoming available in ten years? It's a wonder we dont hear more about this when reading about quantum computers.

We don't because nobody else is as stupid and naive as you.

HTH.

Re:Interesting Implications

[arasinen]

All three points are more or less incorrect. Quantum computing does not necessarily improve every aspect of classical computing. The main difference is that classical computers are dead-on deterministic, while quantum computers are more of a probabilistic sort.

Claim #1: No encryption.

There is a quantum algorithm for factoring large numbers (Shor's algorithm). It will break RSA... but so what? There are elliptic curves and countless other methods of cryptography still available. Quantum computing might or might not be able to break these.

And then there is quantum encryption, ...

Claim #2: Improved compression

The concept of compression is a complex issue of information/communicaton theory. It applies to information, not to computing. Quantum computing is basically just computing; you might find be able to compute the compressed file faster, but no computational method can squeeze information beyond the theoretic limit.

The pi scheme mentioned here is totally unusable: it takes as much bits to represent the index as it takes to represent the data itself.

Claim #3: Faster computing

This too is slightly incorrect. There are some things that are faster to implement with quantum computing. Some things, like adding two to two are suitable for classical computers. Even the Shor's algorithm uses classical FFT at one step. I don't think it's certain that a quantum computer can solve NP-complete problems faster than classical computers.

Besides, for some things *the* optimal solution simply can't be expressed in any computer, quantum or classical. (Think for example the equation x^2 = 2. The answer can't be represented numerically in a computer; however, it can be approximated to as many digits as is necessary.)

Quantum computing does not necessarily imply massive parallel computing. For some applications something like this happens, but it's not the same as having n different computations running simultaniously; more like the the same computation running over with some variation.

Last of all, we don't get full certainty. The Shor's algorithm (IIRC) can give us an answer with very high probability, but that probability isn't 100%. (99.999% perhaps)

Re:Interesting Implications

[Insount]

Wrong on all three accounts, I'm afraid.

1. There are algorithms for efficient factoring and discrete log, so many public-key cryptosystems are can indeed be broken by a quantum computer. However, there is no known quantum algorithm for lattice-based cryptosystems such as NTRU. Moreover, for private-key cryptosystems all we have is a generic search algorithm that finds the key in time SQRT(2^n) where n is the key length, instead of 2^n for a brute force classical search. Thus by doubling the key length of the cipher, you make the work as hard for a quantum computer as the original cipher was for a classical computer.

2. As pointed out in previous replies, the offset will usually be longer than the data. This follows from a simple counting argument.

3. There is no evidnence that quantum computer can efficiently solve NP-complete problems. In fact, many quantum computing researchers believe there isn't one.

The current quantum algorithms are very tantalizing, but restricted in applicability. We really don't know yet what types of problems will benefit from quantum computing beyond the few known classes.

Re:Interesting Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

3. Massive optimization. Remember all those NP-complete problems you learned in comp. sci. ? No more simmulated annealing, genetic algorithm, guesstimation methods. Qubits can find the optimal solution instantly. No more intense calculations for hours/days to find meager 'near' optimal solutions. P.S. NP-complete type problems shows up in almost every complex system in every field / domain.

Combine this with nanotechnological assembly and suddenly, any concerns about patent infringement go right out the window.

"I don't know whether this TV/DVD2 player infringes any design patents or not. It built and tuned itself around the disk..."

Re:Interesting Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

Pure Fiction, you are well named.

Re:Interesting Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

Last of all, we don't get full certainty. The Shor's algorithm (IIRC) can give us an answer with very high probability, but that probability isn't 100%. (99.999% perhaps)

Good post, but note that classical computers also use probabilistic (or at least pseudoprobabilistic) algorithms. That is how large prime numbers used for encryption are tested for primeness... They are not actually factored, and there is a chance that the number may not actually be prime. This chance can be made arbitrarily small.

Re:Interesting Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

ah, found a good link on probable primes (used for RSA etc): http://www.utm.edu/research/primes/notes/prp_prob. html

Re:Interesting Implications

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Quantum Encryption already exists and, unlike RSA, _is_ provably secure. Also, not all existing encryption methods have yet been 'cracked' by quantum algorithms.

2. Except of course you'd have to know PI to an infinate length.

3. No quantum algorithm has yet been developed to solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. The exponential speedup for factoring (which is NPI, not NP-complete) is due to an inherent structure within the problem, and it has been proven that without knowledge of such a structure you can get (at best) get quadratic speed-up. Some people suggest that NP-complete lack any structure, and so will never have a poly-time solution even on a quantum computer.

Wait, wait.. a "computer"?

[mcc]

I am really curious as to what they mean by a "computer" in this specific case. I mean, i have heard that they've done quantum computers capable of picking phone numbers out of a list of four, and such. Which while a HUGE accomplishment is still rather primitive.. Is this just going to be another one of those? A simplistic test machine?

Or is this going to be, like, you know, a real *computer*? Something that can be given general calcuations and work through them? By using the word "computer", are they thinking that what they make is actually going to be something turing-complete, or at least comparable to ENIAC, or maybe even one of the bethemoths that used to sit in the basement of a college (where the computer science students would sign up for a block of time, then come by, drop off large stacks of punchcards, and then wander by the next day to collect the results of the program)?

More importantly, though-- and this is what i'm really wondering about-- if they actually are building a quantum computer that is capable of going into the realm of *running actual programs of some sort*.. what programming language will be used? How will these programs be written? What will the "machine code" look like, and how possible will it be to write software for this in high level languages? (I.e. will it be possible to do HLL abstractions as we do with current computers, at least at first, or will hand-optimisation be too necessary to allow things like "compiling"? I am not 100% sure what a "von neumann" architecture is, but as far as i understand things there are some implicit assumptions in the way that things like C work that kind of only make sense if computers are designed at least generally the way they are now. How different would the architecture of a quantum computer be in a general sense, and how much would current programming languages have to change to make sense in that architecture? Which language is in its current state closest to something that would make sense for the creation of programs on a quantum computer architecture-- C, Python/java, LISP/scheme, Haskell/ML, or APL/Mercury? Or something i've never heard of?

Or is it that special boards or setups whatever will have to be hardwired and specially set up for each specific task (although it will do those tasks really quickly), and this will not be a general-purpose computer capable of doing things like loading and executing an arbitrary written-as-software program?

And to get into the complete castles-in-the-air-speculation realm.. if it is a true general-purpose computer, are they going to try to give it, like, you know, an operating system with things like a kernel and process manager and networking capabilities? Are they going to just stick with letting programs be fed in manualy, or is the thing that they say will take ten years something that is at least realistic to think that you could build one, set it in the basement of a college, and let all the students telnet to it and build and run programs while using some equivilent of unix talk/write to message each other and tyrannical sysadmins constantly watch to see if anyone is playing quantum games so they can kill those processes? (I don't care if they acctually *do* that. Just if that's realistic, my mind is totally blown. I doubt it's realistic.)

Or is anything that may be completed so far in the future they can't really say what it will look like at this point?

I am deathly curious. I desire explanations, or at least links to academic webpages explaining, what sorts of things this computer would do and in what way we would go about giving it its programmatical instructions. Pleasepleaseplease i thank you in advance?

-mcc
If It Can't Process Church Numerals Then What Good Is It

Re:Wait, wait.. a "computer"?

[PureFiction]

Quantum computers are strange, in that they are good for mainly one kind of computation: Combinatorial optimization / state space search.

Normal computers would still be needed to work with quantum computers, and in fact, any kind of quantum computer would likely be a regular digital computer with a 'Quantum CoProcessor' to crunch on the difficult combinatorial optimization / state space search part of the problem.

Everything else would be done by the digital computer.

So, as a short answer to your question, think of Quantum Computers as a math coprocessor that you use in tandem with a digital computer to solve very complex problems that cannot be solved using conventional digital computers (or take prohibitively long to do so).

Re:Wait, wait.. a "computer"?

[Anonymous Coward]

Regarding your programming language question, you can get the Quantum Computation Language (QCL) here.

Re:Wait, wait.. a "computer"?

[Insount]

These are excellent questions. I'll try to answer them as far as my knowledge of the field allows, but please bear in mind that a good answer to some of the issues you raised would significantly enhance our state of knowledge.

First, two key facts.

• A quantum computer can run any classical algorithm. There is some overhead due the reversibility constraint and due to the practical need for error correction, but it's probably a low-order polynomial overhead at worst. In particular, a quantum computer can run a Universal Turing Machine. So, it's fully programmable in respect to classical programs.
• There exists a Universal Quantum Turing Machine that acts analogously to a classical Universal Turing Machine, i.e., lets a fixed quantum computer simulate run any quantum algorithm given a description of that algorithm as additional input. (It does so to finite accuracy, but the error can be made arbitrarily small)

So yes, we're talking about a fully programmable computer. However, this universaily means an increase in the computer size, so for practical reasons you'll see two shortcuts that undermine this universatily.

First, everything that can be done classically is done outside the quantum computer -- a quantum-classical dualism, if you wish. Suppose you have an algorithm that performs operation Q on some register, and applies it 200 times in a loop. You could put the loop counter as part of the quantum computer and program it to do an increment+test+Q operation. However, currently it's much cheaper to put the loop counter outside the quantum computer and simply tell it 200 times to apply a Q operation.

Second, the hardware is made as simple and specialized as possible, and optimized for a specific algorithm.

Now, these shortcuts are clearly present in the tiny quantum computers built so far (latest is IBM's, featuring 8 qubits), and will probably be used for quite some time. But that's mere practice, not theory.

OK, so how do you program this things? All quantum algorithms to date have been expressed using one of two formalisms: either using algebra in the mathematical "Hilbert space" that represents all the states the computer can be in, or using a "quantum circuit" which is just like a normal logical circuit (with gates like AND and NOT), except the gates are different -- in fact the gates are expressed as operations in the Hilbert space, as in the first approach, but it's often easier to see the overall picture if you combine simple gates using the circuit formalism. To be truthful, there's also the "and then you do that N more times, and then you measure first register" type of formalism. :-)

So you see, currently researchers are working at a level way below assembly language, and they're pretty happy about it because the algorithms are very small too. But what about higher-level representations? All efforts I've seen so far use quantum-classical dualism: you write a classical program that manipulates a quantum register (data), but the logic is purely classical. Some do it with a dedicated programming language, some with a class library, but the idea is the same (see a comprehensive list; all of these are mere simulators for now, of course).

Now, this is a very reasonable approach, but it seems rather halfway-there -- wouldn't it beneficial to allow quantum operations in flow control, not only in data? Well, we don't know yet. Currently there are very few "patterns" used in quantum computing, and none of them seems to easier to represent that way. It's hard to design a paradigm, let alone a language, for solving problems that don't yet exist. On the other hand, if we invent such a paradigm it might help us find new quantum algorithms. This is a vast open research area.

As for your speculations on how quantum computers will be used, the answers is yet again that we don't know. Here are the two extreme cases, both easily imagined and consistent with current knowledge. First, it could be that quantum computers will be found to be good for nothing except a few very specialized tasks, and that only a few RSA-cracking devices will be built by intelligence agencies at a prohobitive cost. On the other hand, it could be that a new class of quantum algorithms will be discovered that address more common needs, leading first to something in the college basement and later to a chip in everybody's computer. No one currently knows such these chips can be good for, if at all, though there's some intuition about what's more likely. I do venture to say that which of these possibilities becomes reality depends primarly on usefulness, since long-term prospects for mass-producton seem quite real, given sufficient demand.

I hope this clears things up a bit. I wish I could be more concrete, but it really takes a few hours to get a rough grasp of how these things really work, and a full-semester course to understand the interesting algorithms. Please don't hesitate to e-mail me if you want to discuss this further.

MIT

[Captain Pooh]

Anyone have friends at MIT?

Re:MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone here have friends?

Re:MIT

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a friend, Nastard. His name is a combination of Nads + Turds. He likes to suck off guys and spit their nad nectar onto his turd. Then he rubs it on his nuts. He's a real sicko.

clu#!%!

[UberLame]

Hmm, no one seems to have yet said "How about a beowulf cluster of these things!" yet. People are starting to slack around. Get to work anonymous cowards!!!

Yeah, I know, off topic.

Re:clu#!%!

[UberLame]

Overrated!?! Who moderated that? How do you call something still on it's default rating overrated?!?

Re:clu#!%!

[Anonymous Coward]

Kiss myass. I can't post because I'm getting my cock sucked by Nastard. His name means Nads + Turds.

Yo Mama

[dbCooper0]

hehe - I stumbled across this one while counting the number of how many bytes make a bit? posts - an interesting, metaphorical, and damn funny post! (imho)(not caps because i'm so humble, or at least my opinion is...)

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, actual progress in the quantum computing field. I'm surprised

Now, meanwhile, can anyone tell us how far along exactly that the Optical Computing people are at this point?

Scheduling challenges

[isomeme]

The project, announced last week, is part of a $25 million, five-year alliance launched in June 2000.

Of course, we won't know if the project worked or not until someone looks inside the lab in 2005.

I am getting this funny feeling.....

[crumbz]

...that the world is beginning to look like a long game of Alpha Centuri. We do we see the /. article on Threshold of Transcendance.

-Approaching the singularity

Re:MIT's press release

[Anonymous Coward]

WELL there is yet another way around it, ey folks?

Hey Taco, I thought you WEREN't gonna put any race conditions into Slashdot. You boner!

So long!

[SmileyBen]

God! TEN WHOLE YEARS for something that will revolutionise computing, and perhaps even make us reassess every way in which we view the world! So long! What are these scientists wasting our time for, surely they should have produced this yesterday - it sounds easy enough.

Re:So long!

[ShoeHead]

What are scientists wasting our time for?? What are you talking about. The reason the advances are so slow is because college graduation rate of physics majors is pitful. Our flagship public university, with 50k students graduates 25 physics majors per year. You wanna know why? Math and sciences, but math in particular is being pushed to the side by MTV and Art Class. No one seems to want to do the difEq or LinAl needed to get any work done.

Engineering schools are snapping up anyone who's lucky enough to make it through the HS math sump alive. Those a little braver are still discouraged by parents and media arguing for higher salaries, more partying, and of course more corporate sponsored and prescibed merchandise.

I'm disgusted.

Re:So long!

[SmileyBen]

I was joking! The article seemed to suggest that ten years was ages to wait, but this is an ABSURDLY revolutionary step in terms of computing and how we view the world, and to be told that it'll happen in ten years is almost frightening for it being so soon...

Ten Years?!

[Anonymous Coward]

That's about how long it takes a nigger to get through college! Which he got into my taking a deserving cracker's place.

[#452338 ] large numbers of trolls in user base

[Anonymous Coward]

Date: 2001-08-17 20:02

Priority: 5

Submitted By: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)

Assigned To: Nobody/Anonymous (nobody)

Category:

Users Status: Closed

Summary:

large numbers of trolls in user base
A large nest of trolls seems to have built a nest
somewhere in the nether regions of the slashdot system.
Perhaps they live under the router (after all, it's
sort of like a bridge).

Anti-troll measures should be built into slashcode to
repel the beasts post haste. I've been told thoughtful
debate can have that effect. So try giving that fat
fucka JonKatz d4 b00t!

Not quite that good

[KM1]

"Massive optimization. Remember all those NP-complete problems you learned in comp. sci. ? No more simmulated annealing, genetic algorithm, guesstimation methods. Qubits can find the optimal solution instantly."

This is actually not quite true. So far no one has found a quantum computer algorithm which solves an NP-complete problem in polynomial time. This is perhaps one of the things that tend to get people overly exicted about quantum computers. They will most likely be built and become more or less practical, depending on the amount of technological progress, but they are not magic. So far most problems for which there are fast quantum algortihms are problems which can be solved in less than exponential time on an ordinary computer. There are a few exceptions like simulating a quntum system, but these problems are not NP-complete.
However there is no mathematical proof that a polynomial time quantum algorithm for an NP-complete problem could not be found, but the same is true for a classical algortihm for NP-complete problems.

Quantum Computing Is One ofthe Biggest Hoaxes Ever

[Louis Savain]

Extremely challenging, like in "it can't work and it won't ever work, but I hope the government and the industry sponsors won't find that out, at least until I retire, preferably after I am dead."

This is so true. David Deutsch is a half-crazed crackpot and con artist who manage to convince a bunch of gullible people that his chicken faether voodoo physics is real science. I never thought I'd live to see the day when science is turned into in-your-face superstition by a bunch of swindlers. Do physicists think that there are beyond public scrutiny? Do they really think they can throw any crap at the public and that the public is forced to swallow it? I think they should be careful because the public is not as stupid as they want us to belive. One day, we'll wake up from our stupor and wipe that smug superiority smile off their faces. After all we pay their salaries and we reserve the ultimate right to decide what is good science and what is not.

It is up to us, it is up to the citizens of a free society to either accept the chauvinism of science without contradiction or to overcome it by the counterforce of public action. Paul Feyerabend

Some of the challenges

[JPMH]

The Economist had a good article back in May about the state of the art (7 qubits), and some of the practical difficilties facing quantum computing.

"Dr Cory says that the program for factorising large numbers [400 digits] will require about 1,000 qubits simply to store the problem. But each of these qubits will require dozens of extra qubits for error-checking. That means that a useful computer will need tens of thousands of qubits to come up with a reliable answer. At seven and counting, that goal is a long way off. "

I just invented a new type of computer...

[Anonymous Coward]

It runs on trinary, rather than binary, three states: -1, 0, & 1. It will revolutionize computing and put Intel & AMD out of business.

This will be my quantum computer, the one and only in the world, with which I will crack all encryptions rendering them insecure.

All your data are belong to trinary.

---------------------

It runs on trinary, rather than binary, three states: -1, 0, & 1. It will revolutionize computing and put Intel & AMD out of business.

This will be my quantum computer, the one and only in the world, with which I will crack all encryptions rendering them insecure.

All your data are belong to trinary.

---------------------

It runs on trinary, rather than binary, three states: -1, 0, & 1. It will revolutionize computing and put Intel & AMD out of business.

This will be my quantum computer, the one and only in the world, with which I will crack all encryptions rendering them insecure.

All your data are belong to trinary.

---------------------

It runs on trinary, rather than binary, three states: -1, 0, & 1. It will revolutionize computing and put Intel & AMD out of business.

This will be my quantum computer, the one and only in the world, with which I will crack all encryptions rendering them insecure.

All your data are belong to trinary.

---------------------

It runs on trinary, rather than binary, three states: -1, 0, & 1. It will revolutionize computing and put Intel & AMD out of business.

This will be my quantum computer, the one and only in the world, with which I will crack all encryptions rendering them insecure.

All your data are belong to trinary.

---------------------

It runs on trinary, rather than binary, three states: -1, 0, & 1. It will revolutionize computing and put Intel & AMD out of business.

This will be my quantum computer, the one and only in the world, with which I will crack all encryptions rendering them insecure.

All your data are belong to trinary.

---------------------

[ Reply to This | Parent ]

Hmm

[TFloore]

Soemone joked about going back in time and patenting the AND gate.

Why joke... Just do it with the Next Big Thing...

So what you're saying is...

[Mr. Sketch]

it won't run Linux? Then what good is it? :). If I can't get QLinux for it, then why should I bother?

This article is gibberish

[MobyDisk]

"While the classical bit can store any number between 0 and 255 on each of its eight bytes, the qubit can store all the numbers between 0 and 255 on a byte of eight qubits."

So a classical bit has 8 bytes and ranges 0-255? But a quantum byte has 8 qubits and ranges 0-255. Ummmm..... no.

Cool!

[ioman1]

I have heard a lot of about Quantum computers, I bet DT does a feature on what they are are etc.. very soon. This is the technology that will change the world.

hi

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there something wrong with your computer? it seems to have spots on the screen, oh thats right, your computer is a piece of shit, faggot.

I really liked the word pictures
that I saw. .while reading
netnews at my office the
other day,. .and it seemed
like a really great concept, and
well worth taking the time
to come up with a few more
variations. These are some
of the ideas that wouldn't
let me rest until I chose to put
them down. Really, the
type of variation that
THIS form allows could
stagger the mind. Perhaps, if we
wanted to, we could write
messages as a solid block
of writing in which words
can also be read in the spacing!

220000 post sucka!

[Anonymous Coward]

reprezent reprezent zent...

who's the shiznit now.

Re:Quantum Computing Is One ofthe Biggest Hoaxes E

[Anonymous Coward]

Ahhh, science by public popularity contest. Richard Dawkins said, "Show me a cultural relativist at 30,000 feet, and I'll show you a hypocrite" and I tend to agree. Criticise not from a position of ignorance, but from research, logic and evidence.

"After all we pay their salaries and we reserve the ultimate right to decide what is good science and what is not"

All the money in the world can't switch off gravity, nor make the earth flat. I'm sure if you were around when Darwin published `Origin of the the Species', you'd be ranting and raving in the same way.

David Deutsch's physics is solid. You may have quibbles with his philosphy but that is immaterial to the pursuit of quantum computation.

even if its vapor

[RestiffBard]

I'm certain that Dr. Feynman is very proud that we're actually clsoe to building something he had envisioned. its also something that I think all of us have been patiently waiting for but often thought of as being a 50 years off kind of thing.

Re:Quantum Computing Is One of the Biggest Hoaxes

[Louis Savain]

All the money in the world can't switch off gravity, nor make the earth flat.

It can't create an infinite number of universes either. Nor can it allow time travel (a la Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne) or have a particle's state be two mutually exclusive values concurrently. Especially when nobody is looking.

QM is mostly guess work these days.

[Anonymous Coward]

Any one reading standard model will find that many ghost particles are predicted and named to fit the puzzle. "Any transitory state of two particles interacting is proved with the exchange of 3rd particle with life of milli-milli-milli-milli...seconds. " A man dying can be said to be a new life-state, as he neither dead nor alive state!!

Great general QC background.

[RobertFisher]

The link posted above contained a really good general QC background, written up as part of this fellow's Master's thesis, intended for CS people, starting with basic quantum physics and going on to qubits and basic quantum computing. I think it is worthwhile pointing out the link :

http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/quprog/index.ht ml

Bob

HP Quantum Computers

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!

QC good and bad research

[Anonymous Coward]

When reading a science news story, one should bear in mind the following: (1)Some scientists would sell their mother in order to get research money. They grossly exaggerate (some might say, lie) when describing to the press the importance of their research contributions. Read, for example, the famous expose of Robert Gallo (HIV non-discoverer) written by a Pulitzer prize winning journalist. (2)Sadly, most science journalist do very little research to verify the veracity of their sources. They basically repeat what they are told almost verbatim. If they antagonize scientists, they won't get future stories, and they'll be out of job. (3)Scientists are not the only ones that exaggerate: their institutions, also greedy for research dollars, have publicity departments which add an extra layer of exaggerations to the press releases. Large universities (e.g. MIT) , government labs (e.g., Los Alamos) and, of course, large corporations (e.g., IBM) all have very active publicity departments.

To judge how good a scientist on quantum computation(QC) is, I first apply the Los Alamos eprint acid test: I look at the number (and quality) of papers on QC that he has deposited at xxx.lanl.gov. (Most QC papers are deposited there. Any scientist that doesn't put his work there is clueless). Gershenfeld has 0 eprints. This tells me that he is a feather weight as far as technical prowess. Chuang has 30 eprints, much better.

http://arXiv.org/find/quant-ph/1/au:+Chuang_I/0/1/ 0/all/0/1

Unfortunately, Chuang's work is mainly on NMR quantum computers. A nice review of the status of NMR-QC is

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0009002

NMRQC has a serious shortcoming; it can't do entanglement. This was first proven in

http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/9811018

on Nov 98, by some very respected scientists. The following popular article about NMRQC

http://www.technologyreview.com/magazine/may00/wal drop.asp

appeared on May 2000, 1.5 years after it was shown that NMRQC cannot do entanglement, and yet, it does not mention this serious shortcoming. Whitewash alert!! Chuang was interviewed for this article, and he didn't mention this serious shortcoming. Suddenly, my "Non-ethical scientist alert!" starts blinking.

I do believe that quantum computers are a promising field, but I don't think Chuang and Gershenfeld are good scientist/engineers, and they are too political. In my opinion, the best work on QC hardware is being done by Wineland's group at NIST (they entangled 4 ions) and by Bruce Kane (see article in this month's Wired magazine). As for QC software, see Julia Wallace's list

http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~jwallace/simrevab.htm

Why the bitterness towards advanced Math/Science?

[Listen Up]

Why are so many people incredibly bitter and unknowing of the pure sciences such as Mathematics and Physics? If there is something you don't understand, due to lack of education, where do you think the answers lie...God? I am not religious, and am not of a faith bound to a single God, but apparently from what I understand you can't experimentally prove Him, you can't touch, see, or smell Him, and he is a helluva lot more abstract and unprovable than any Physics or Mathematics could possibly hope achieve. Yet, Quantum Mechanics seems to be something you wholeheartly disconcern as hype and lies. Why? To myself and many others, Mathematics and Science is God...it is the language of the universe. There is no "mysticism" in that.
I am a Pure Mathematician, as I have stated in many of my other posts. Mathematics is the language of the Universe. All of science is Mathematics in the end, and as such holds the answers to every question the universe holds. Every mathematical equation and answer has been abstract at some point. Even the original Arabic concept of the zero. Mathematics follows very, very strict rules. If mathematics, which is Physics, says that something exists, then it does. The idea of what it may be may be up to interpretation, which is where most Physics is done, but the pure mathematics is not. So, if an idea is too abstract for you to comprehend, does it mean it is automatically false? No, of course not. It just means you don't understand it.
Mathematicians and Physicists, especially ones at a place like MIT, are not there to "scam" or "swindle" you. Neither you nor I am a student or professor at MIT, and therefore have no right to judge their intelligence, integrity, or their minds. Quantum Mechanics is a science, and an incredibly important one at that. You terribly miquoted Einstein and others when you made the blatantly incorrect reference to his stance on Quantum Mechanics (which is based on Probabilities, unlike Einstein's relatively 'flat' universe). Einstein actually helped create Quantum Mechanics and was quoted as saying "Quantum Mechanics...Scary things happening at a distance." That was his quote, and it has nothing to do with what you blatantly messed up. He said is was scary to him...Something one of the greatest minds that has ever lived didn't completely understand. So why do you think you should be able to?
Let's take an everyday example to a moment. Have you ever gone to the grocery store and purchased something? Did the cashier wave your product, which contained a bunch of bars in a small box called a UPC over some lasers, and *presto*...Your total came up on the cash register? Are you someone who never thinks twice about how that works or are you someone who takes the time to find out. Well, you would have no clue how it works without a college course in Contemporary Abstract Algebra. The math that makes your UPC work are such abstract things as Group Theory, Ring Theory, and Modular Multiplication. These things, which while looking at them plain faced mean nothing to you. But, dig deeper, become educated in the pure science of mathematics, and all of a sudden you realize that without Group Theory, Ring Theory, and Modular Multiplication nothing would work at all. Now, to explain, most CS majors know what Mod. Mul. is, right? Well, when applied to a Ring (which I have no room to explain here) you can choose a prime number (another of those abstract ideas) as your Ring modifier and apply the Prime Ring to your Mod. Mul. and you have the ability to create a code that has basically only one real solution (well, technically possibly more than one solution depending on your prime seed, but it would be a process of reverse engineering the UPC mathematics to figure it out, and no one cares, unless you have a Pure Math degree, a permanent marker, a code sheet of the vendor's UPC codes, and a lot of spare time). Hidden in that UPC bar code is the correct number to undo the Ring, thus giving you the Product ID of the food you purchased.
Since Abstract Algebra has been around for almost 200 hundred or more years now, do you think anyone then could have imagined a UPC code in the 20th/21st century? No, of course not. And always be careful of reading "rebuttal" sites on the net or in print. None of them are written by anyone even remotely qualified to say anything. Especially judging the article you referenced and your apparent respect for it. Please never stop dreaming, and never doubt something out of hand, simply because you don't understand it. Peace.

Science and Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

If this was the first slashdot story I ever encountered, I would have formed the opinion that no posters know *squat* about quantum physics, but trash other opinions anyway in favor of their own idiocy. Does anyone really hope to see a valuable comment posted here, or are we all just scrolling down the screen looking for the Funny comments?

As it is, I have read slashdot for too long, and have taken all that experience and formed the same opinion. Strange.

How the hell did you hit the +1 karma bonus?

[paranormalized]

Dude, I looked at your .sig link (Nasty Little Truth About Spacetime Physics) and found no useful math whatsoever. This guy wants to debate fine points of physics, and doesn't understand the language at all. It's like debating comp sci w/o any understanding of if-then logic, much less And-Or logic. My guess is he's a philosophy major who was frequently humiliated in class by the guys who knew math, and thus is on a crusade against anyone who passed calculus.

I hope you have a great sense of humor, or else have just neglected your physics education, because currently I have little faith in your powers of logic.

OTOH, I suppose you're a neccessary part of the scientific eco-system. We always need people criticizing the accepted standards, pushing us to put up (give some physical proof) or shut up. I would prefer, though, if you would adhere to the same standards of intellectual honesty that your typical scientist does. For instance, if you could come up w/ some alternate theories w/ solid predictions, that could be verified or disproven, I might listen. Otherwise, you're little more than a crackpot claiming that stuff doesn't work because it doesn't make sense, to your math-illiterate brain. Well, tough. The Universe is not mandated to 'make sense' to the Joe Public, especially if he refuses to try. The power of populism only goes so far, you know.

At least the original post linked to someone who is willing to make predictions that can be proven or disproven. That man is a scientist, IMHO, whether I agree w/ him or not. Your link is to a crackpot, OTOH.

Actually.

[kypper]

I use BSD, and a few flavours of linux.

You must enjoy your Mac.

With any luck at all...

[steevo.com]

...it won't be a "Pavilion"

Re:Why the bitterness towards advanced Math/Scienc

[Anonymous Coward]

Well put, albeit somewhat long-winded.

I am not a math major, although sometimes I wish I was. However, I can say that at one point in time, Henry Ford's engineers told him that his request couldn't be done. Ford told them "keep working at it." Just because our grasp of math and physics isn't up to snuff yet, don't discount the future. People thought that man would never land on the moon either.
Sooooo typical of Slashdotters to just come charging in spewing babble about the articles not being true to try to prove how smart they are. You people all annoy me. Give the human race some credit.

Insufferable Pomposity

[Louis Savain]

If there is one thing that a great many physicists and mathematicians have in common, it's their insufferable pomposity. My site was not created for you. It's for the lay public. They are the ones who need to wake up and wipe that smug superiority smile off your faces and remind you who the real bosses are. So if you don't like it, don't read it.

Re:Insufferable Pomposity

[Stalyn]

Sir, I have visited your site in the past and looked it over and even considered emailing you about it. Yet, I decided not too. However I feel here is a chance to ask you some questions about your ideas listed on said webpage.

First of all your logical argument against travel in spacetime to me makes no sense. You find that it is self-referential, because to find the velocity in the time axis the equation would be v = dt/dt.
If a time dimension does exist it would not be a spatial dimension therefore 'velocity' within it wouldnt make any sense in the first place. Velocity is a phenomena that is found in our (3D) world. However there is a connection between relative velocity and time itself. The faster you travel the slower time appears to be. This has been proven with atomic clocks on space flights. 'Time' itself did slow down, even though it was fractions of seconds.

I dont understand your point. Another thing you claim they are mathematical abstracts and have no counter-parts in nature. Yes they are abstracts but so is any language. The human mind takes experience and puts them in nice little symbolic packages so they can be transferred between human beings (language). This is math, and even english. Just because they are does not make them false.

You seem to me to be very anti-science. Also I think you take Feyerabend out of context. I deeply respect Feyerabend but he is not against science. His point was to make science more humanistic. Using any one methodology would slow down the progress of science because science is a human art. An interpretation of reality that becomes a world view. I would have to agree with David Bohm that insight comes before the mathematical equations. The math(or language, paintings, etc) just describes this insight.

Think of scientists more like painters who use math as their paintbrush to interpret the world. Science is a very fulfulling and beautiful thing do not resent it.

Again what is your point my friend? Science sometimes gets boggled down in its own abstractions and becomes a little crazy but what human endeavor does not?

Re:Insufferable Pomposity

[Louis Savain]

First of all your logical argument against travel in spacetime to me makes no sense. You find that it is self-referential, because to find the velocity in the time axis the equation would be v = dt/dt.
If a time dimension does exist it would not be a spatial dimension therefore 'velocity' within it wouldnt make any sense in the first place.

You are agreeing with me. It is precisely for this reason that there is no time travel. IOW, there is no motion in spacetime. Therefore there is no spacetime and no time dimension either.

Velocity is a phenomena that is found in our (3D) world. However there is a connection between relative velocity and time itself. The faster you travel the slower time appears to be.

An observer will notice a moving clock to run slower. Time itself cannot change because changing time is self-referential.

This has been proven with atomic clocks on space flights. 'Time' itself did slow down, even though it was fractions of seconds.

Not entirely correct. Time dilation is a misnomer. Time can neither slow down nor speed up. Only processes (clocks) slow down. Clocks are used to measure invariant temporal intervals. Intervals measured with a moving clock or a clock under the influence of gravity will seem longer than with a non-moving or inertial clock. "Time dilation" is not time travel. If a slowed clock actually traveled in time, it would simply disappear from view. I suggest you take a look at the book "Relativity from A to B" by Robert Geroch. Here's an excerpt:

There is no dynamics within space-time itself: nothing ever moves therein; nothing happens; nothing changes. [...] In particular, one does not think of particles as "moving through" space-time, or as "following along" their world-lines. Rather, particles are just "in" space-time, once and for all, and the world-line represents, all at once the complete life history of the particle.

Also check out the work of relativists like Bianchi, Pavsic and Horwitz, especially the latter's invariant tau formalism. I am not making any of this stuff up.

Another thing you claim they are mathematical abstracts and have no counter-parts in nature.

I never made any such claim. I said that the spacetime model has no counterpart in nature. If it did, there would be no motion. Please do not use this strawman against me. I'd appreciate a little bit of honesty from my critics.

You seem to me to be very anti-science.

No I am not. I love science. I am against the "chauvinism of science", as Feyerabend puts it in his "Against Method." I am especially against quackery that passes itself as science. I am against any group of people who would set itself up as some kind of privileged priesthood over the public.

Again what is your point my friend? Science sometimes gets boggled down in its own abstractions and becomes a little crazy but what human endeavor does not?

We, the public, pay good money for scientific research. A lot of money. We deserve to get good science for our money. Not snake oil. Quackery from famous charlatans is orders of magnitude more detrimental to humanity than crackpottery from your run of the mill crackpot. It is like a monkey wrench in the works. It can set us back for decades if not centuries.

Since HP likes to name their products with numbers

[quintessent]

what will they call this product? Maybe:

The HP [0-9][0-9][0-9][A-D|G|N|L|R|P|Q|X][T|S|X|Z]

Ask the NSA

[Anonymous Coward]

they already got quantum computers operating.

REJECTED?????

[securitas]

Uhhh... yeah. So I submitted this exact same story a few days ago when the original article appeared on IDG.net . It was rejected.

Guess I should go for CNN as the authoritative recycler of science content next time instead of getting it from the source. After all, we all know how CNN is always right. :/

Arbitrary decisions aside, at least this is some encouragement that the irresistable force of Moore's Law won't meet the immovable object of the physical limits of silicon, etc and our universe will continue to exist!

Re:REJECTED?????

[securitas]

Ooops! Forgot to add this link to the Quantum Applications Symposium 2001 site

Observing without interacting

[Slur]

A simple physics question, or maybe not so simple:

Can phenomena which are in no particular state (i.e., the wave that lives in the space between non-existence and existence) have interim unobserved effects during the "particle"->"wave"->"particle" transition? Or is the wave/particle duality an impenetrable boundary, the "wave state" something that can never be "known" in itself?

It seems that in such a "quantum system" one could induce some potential course of action, and by measuring the existence or nonexistence of a resulting effect infer the meaning of the result based on the original parameters. In this case you can use time as the controlling variable, and all is right with the world.

(Intruducing time into the equation is the only means to observe a system without necessarily interacting with it that I can think of. At least, you probably only need to interact half of the time.)

Once you've made a logical branch based on the result (or non-result) then you can happily reset the system to a known state and set up the next "instruction."

I realize this is an oblique notion, but it makes a weird kind of sense if you've done enough acid! ;-) I'm untainted by any deep understanding of quantum computing, so I'm just riffing off my intuition. Does quantum computing rely on preserving states in such a way that my theoretical brute-force approach would topple the system?

So where has it been?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since it's a quantum computer, and since predictions say it will be built in about ten years - it should already have become the defacto standard for computing today... Since it hasn't, I predict that it won't ever be developed. %)

quantum memory in NY Times

[peter303]

Today's NY Times has an
article on quantum memory.
This is not the same as quantum computing,
but does use a quantum state of atoms to make
propose extremely dense memory.

Nietzsche, author, dead at 157

[Anonymous Coward]

Nietzsche is dead !

my 2 cents

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks like a *Quantum Leap*

sorry, couldn't resist :)

Some background Spin

[GreazyMF]

The New York Times has an interesting, not-too-technical article with information on Spintronics. Spintronics is the art and science of developing practical applications which take advantage of an electron's inherent property of spin. Some discussion of M-RAM is presented which would be a very important first step in the actual deployment of a quantum computer. As a side note, my crypto professor at the U always said that if quantum computers ever became a reality, all current encryption methods would quickly become quite useless. I was wondering if anyone has looked at developing encryption algorithms which could specifically take advantage of the possibilities of quantum computing and remain secure.

I am the Yeti!!!

Another Quantum Computing Article

[xtheunknown]

This article at Open magazine (loosely related to /.) also talks about Quantum Computing.

No.

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Re:Wait, wait.. a "computer"? Dave

[Anonymous Coward]

...Hilbert is channeled by my g/f and he/she/i have only 1 thing to say....

ROFL...........in an "invariant" kind of way

and how many have gotten it????