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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 ...'"
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
I was getting tired of Geforce2 quality graphics.
Someone will have to observe them to get a definitive answer.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
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
<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>
What's the point of moderating?!
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...
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
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.
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
His biography is quite the read. You can get it here.
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...
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!
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
These evil crackers are trying to circumvent factor based encryption, a copyright protection scheme. Lock 'em up
Simple people talk of people, better people talk of events, great people talk of ideas.
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.
Imagine the power we will have to crack passwords when this quantum computing goes through
Go see ramdac
This is all nice, but:
What sort of frame rates will I be getting in Quake3?
Fnord!
Fnord!
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
--CTH
--Got Lists? | Top 95 Star Wars Line
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
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?
You can't handle the truth.
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
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
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
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...)
db
Cig:
ôô
Of course, we won't know if the project worked or not until someone looks inside the lab in 2005.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Of course when you look to see what color it is, the act of looking changes the color.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...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
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.
"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.
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
"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. "
Soemone joked about going back in time and patenting the AND gate.
Why joke... Just do it with the Next Big Thing...
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
it won't run Linux? Then what good is it? :). If I can't get QLinux for it, then why should I bother?
Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
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.
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.
-
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.
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.
http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/quprog/index.ht ml
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
Quantum computing does have one benefit, though. At least when you look you find out whether the cat is dead or alive. :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
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.
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.
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IANASRP- I am not a self-referential phrase
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email: proprietary becomes free, org to com
You must enjoy your Mac.
...it won't be a "Pavilion"
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.
The HP [0-9][0-9][0-9][A-D|G|N|L|R|P|Q|X][T|S|X|Z]
Donate background CPU time to fight cancer.
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!
A simple physics question, or maybe not so simple:
;-) 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?
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!
-- thinkyhead software and media
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.
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!!!
It wasn't easy being Greazy
This article at Open magazine (loosely related to /.) also talks about Quantum Computing.
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.