Slashdot Mirror
Quantum Computer Possible From Silicon Fab
Cash Mitchell writes: "This article from the EE Times says 'Researchers at the University of Wisconsin in Madison claim to have created the world's first successful simulation of a quantum-computer architecture that uses existing silicon fabrication techniques.... With existing fabrication techniques, the team estimates that a million-quantum-dot computer (1,024 x 1,024 array) could be built today and operated in the megahertz range.'"
...unless of course you try to look at the results.
Intel's lawyers could not be reached for comment.
However, within minutes the domain name "million-quantum.com" was registered by some greedy slashdotter hoping to cash in.
No Zen is good zen
How many cats will be sacrificed to test a 1024x1024 quantum array I wonder?
Man, just imagine a Beowulf cluster of quantum computers! ...used by the NSA to track your library-borrowing habits.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
What are practical, everyday use? (besides breaking incredibly big and long keys to steal identities) These things operate at room temperature and are small and cheap enough for everyone to have.
A personal weather forecaster, fluid dynamic calculating, realtime, 3d cellphone with a cute ring tone? Or a wash machine that can predict el nino's?
Help me here...
I admit to knowing next to nothing about quantum computers or quantum computing. Well, actually I guess it is nothing.
However something seems wrong about using the term "megahertz" in regards to a quantum computer. I didn't think quantum computing had anything in common with a typical synchronous design. Can anyone clarify this for me?
Uh, hate to burst the bubble of your little security apocalypse, but encryption schemes which will baffle quantum computers have been worked out for a while now, well in advance of the hardware's availability. Of course, for all I know it may *take* a quantum computer to implement these schemes (otherwise it seems like we'd just use them now), which would create two security classes of users, one of whom could penetrate the other's security at will. Yikes.
My deviantArt site
Well, since the porn web admins probably log into your porn site using public key encryption, and a quantum computer can crack private keys in fairly short order- your disgusting porn feed could be getting quite a bit cheaper ;-)
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"All 4 researchers unloaded their holdings of PayPal and Verisign.
What happens when you try to factor too big a prime number? (If you've read the book, you'll know. ;) )
i am a soviet space shuttle
It can solve NP complete problems in seconds instead of taking longer than say, the present age of the universe.
OK, let me see if I've got this straight:
Quantum computing is just around the corner. Blind people can get optical implants directly into their brains, allowing them to recover sight. (Not perfect today, but just wait 'til Moore's law gets hold of this hardware.) It may be possible to build a space elevator within the next 15-20 years. And so on, and so on.
The singularity is suddenly looking a lot less theoretical.
This is what I'm talking about. Damn, now I need to start saving for a quantum computer...
Don't suppose there is any chance of one of these things opening a doorway to a parallel universe where women find me irresistible?
I truly take pride in this discovery... mostly because I attend UW. But I suppose a love of physics helps in that area, too.
Anyways, here's a somewhat technical article regarding the research (PDF).
Oh, and "On Wisconsin!"
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
You could run a Beowulf cluster on one machine.
I can't imagine a port would be necessart since Doom III uses entirely deterministic algorithms and the non-deterministic computation the quantum computer is capable of is a superset of deterministic computation.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Quantum computers could render assymetric crypto next-to-useless, and as-such may permenantly set electronic privacy back decades for all but the super-powerful.
Those that claim quantum cryptography will redress this problem don't understand that quantum crypto will likely be even more expensive than secure symmetric cryptography.
In essence, the advent of quantum computers may be the turning point, the point where advances in computer communication are no-longer tools of freedom, but become, once more, tools of the powerful.
Up for "1" and down for "0".
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Qubits have a tendancy to degrade and lose their state. Researchers tend to be happy if you could get the right answer from a calculation 80-90% of the time. This just means you have to do the calculation multiple times to make sure they agree.
...to break RSA. Specifically, I believe that Shor's Algorithm requires 3n qubits, where n is the number of bits of the number you're trying to factor. Multiply by a factor of five to allow some error correction, and you need about 15k qubits to crack 1024-bit RSA.
I work in the field (still an undergrad, but I'm doing some research), and I had the opportunity to meet Michael Nielsen a little while ago when he visited the Perimeter Institute and the University of Waterloo. Nielsen is one of the two authors of the book you mentioned. Out of curiousity, what university do you go to, Misanthropic?
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/index.html/ www.fourmilab.ch/rpkp/
http:/
Have a long hard look at that first link before you ignorantly dismiss this person's opinion.
There is a lot of research into this - the ability for thought to influence the outcome of random calculations and events. It's been years since I looked into any of this, the most common experiment is a depiction of a random number generator that you can make devitate from a true random distribution over time by willing it to do so.
Maybe there's something there, maybe there isn't, but you don't just dismiss or accept it out of hand without looking at experimental evidence yay or nay.
..don't panic
Mostly be corrected? Am I the only one for whom this does not sound particularly reassuring...or usefull?
I'm not certain.
IIRC, there have been some ideas that quantum computers could be used to more effectively model protein folding than we can now. Perhaps even allow the reverse problem of protein engineering (given a desired protein active site structure, to either find a structure that will fold to it or show that none will) to be tackled.
If course, just like everything else that would be revolutionary, the best things are those we can't think of yet.
I'm dubious of this though. I'll start believing it when I see a 10 by 10 demonstrator array running at a few kilohertz. Until then, it's just a nice idea.
What about the stuff people encrypted that they assumed would be uncrackable for a long time?
The whole public-key infrastructure is still in its infancy. Oops, now we have to start building a new one before we finished building the original one.
Maybe strong crypto was just a short golden age, never again to occur. Maybe it's just normal that all codes become obsolete within 10 years, and nobody should expect the kind of information privacy we've started to take for granted.
Find free books.
I laughed until my insides hurt. That was hilarious! Thank you.
~Philly
Doesn't Windows make your computer a quantum computer?
You never know its stability state until you attempt an operation. Upon doing so you can't tell what it will do next.
(With apologies to Mr. Schrodinger and Mr. Heisenberg)
"They do not preach that their god will rouse them, a little before the Nuts work loose." Kipling, 'The Sons of Martha'
As for the use of quantum computers in AI - at present, nobody has provided an example of a vaguely AI-related problem that quantum computers of the type currently being studied would be useful for. Somebody may do so in the future, of course. In any case, anything that can be done on a quantum computer can be simulated on a normal one (in a theoretical sense, it may take till the end of the universe to do so). They don't give you the ability to compute anything "non-algorithmic".
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
I thought it was very difficult to simulate a quantum computer on a classical computer. Some problems in quantum mechanics can't be properly simulated by a classical system at all.
Once you go past a certain number of qubits, it takes too long to simulate all the possible interactions.
Not that I don't believe we'll see a working quantum co-processor in the next few decades, I'm positive we will.
But I'm just wondering how they came up with the "million qubits" number.
Like, a guy posted something about QC's being helpful in understanding protein folding; I think it could be much more than that. A good way of simulating atomic interactions, without ignoring their quantum aspects, could be revolutionary for any industry that works on the atomic-scale.
These industries include biotech and medicine, chip design, MEMS, all kinds of materials science, nanotech, superconductivity research, how-to-wind-nanotubes-into-space-elevator-cable research, and, yes, how-to-build-better-quantum-computers research.
There was a recent discussion about quantum computers (QCs) on sci.crypt. The consensus is, given a powerful enough QC, all public-key methods (RSA, Diffe-Helman, Elliptic Curve systems, etc) are badly broken by Shor's algorithm.
But symmetric ciphers (AES, DES, Blowfish, Serpent, etc) only have their effective key length cut in half, as a consequence of Grover's algorithm for searching an unordered list in O(sqrt(N)) time. So 64-bit keys become crackable with 2^32 work, and 128-bit keys in 2^64 work. Using 256-bit symmetric keys is considered sufficient to negate the threat of QCs.
I'm not sure about other cryptographic constructs such as PRNGs (Yarrow, ANSI X9.17) or hash functions (SHA-1, MD5), but I'm guessing at worst you would just have to double the size of the internal state to achieve security levels comparable to today.
Disclaimer: IANAC (I am not a cryptographer) but I do know quite a few.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on lunch.
...will quantum-computer only have a virus if anti-virus programs look?
The race isn't always to the swift... but that's the way to bet!
So we use a quantum computer as a signal processor.
But be willing to accept errors in the data transmission.
Bit errors would be data from other universes.
devise a communications protocal.
Have conversations with the infinite number of your alternates that are also working on their quantum computers to acheive the same effects.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
I wonder whether they used perl...
Favorite quote: "The Quantum::Entanglement module attempts to port some of the functionality of the universe into Perl."
I doubt, therefore I may be.
a million-quantum-dot computer (1,024 x 1,024 array) should be enough for anybody!
Of course, if that's the case, an interesting question comes to light: how acurate and predictive are these simulations, that they would be able to predict quantum effects? Does anyone know anything about this sort of "simulated research?"
credo quia absurdum
I have heard suggestions that alternative designs for quantum computers would theoretically be able to tackle the TSP (or indeed any NP-complete problems) but from what little I know about the area I don't believe anybody's come up with a vaguely plausible way such a computer might be constructed.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Because it's correct. If the only application of quantum computers were to factoring numbers their usefulness would be quite limited. Please look at this article in nature, which talks about the speedups derived from quantum computing techniques when solving NP complete problems.
My first computer was made out of a process that has acheived Megahertz speeds. The VIC-20
It ran at about 1MHz. Maybe they should start by building a quantum VIC-20 and work their way up the scale again. A quantum 64 with quantum SID, and so on...
So if this is for real, RSA will soon be dead. Does there exist a quantum algorithm for solving the discrete logrithm problem in manageable time?
Quantum physics hasn't delivered anything for forty years.
Excuse me? Heterostructure lasers haven't been around for forty years yet, have they?
Check out this list of achievements that quantum physics has made for telecommunications.
(A.P. New Your City, 2011 August 19) Early beta testing of Microsoft's Windows QP Pro (quantum) installed on a Intel Octoplex 19 Gigahertz quantum MPU resulted in less than stellar results.
Commander Taco in his test lab grumbled, "I can transport myself to Hong Kong, get measured for a suit, grab a quick hooker, and be back before this think has booted!"
Other anomolies included past life echos, fire, brimstone, and the aparent "voice of God".
Bill Gate's head could not be reached for comments.
-- www.globaltics.net
Political discussion for a new world
Have a long hard look at that first link before you ignorantly dismiss this person's opinion.
Fine. I took a pretty good look at that first link. I hereby informedly dissmiss his oppinion. I had to dig to find http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/publist.html with the actual reports with data. I read two, #10 and #11 (selected at whim after skimming titles).
First of all almost all of the results came up negative. They refer to results below average as "negative results", but any result below statitical signifigance is actually a negative result. Second: in #10 *think* I caught them using 1-tail signifigance test in some places they should have used 2-tail tests. If so, that would switch some "postive" results into "negative" results. Third: in #11 I *think* they improperly included incomplete runs for parts of the analysis while excluding them from other parts. This could potentially distort results. Fourth: they cross-analyized the data umpteen different ways actually working to get positive results. If you check sub-sets of the data 20 different ways then one of them should exceed 95% statistical signifigance purely at random. Fifth: In #11 they actually had the gall to throw away half of the data that they didn't like and recalculate the results. When you change the data set after the fact it is trivial to distort the results into fake "statistical signifigance". Sixth: selection bias, negative results are less likey to be published. Seventh: selection bias again, whos bothers reading or linking to papers with negative results?
If there were genuine psychic phenomena the field would explode with scientists. It would explode with military intrest. And perhaps most of all , it would explode with commercial investment/exploitation (chuckle).
By far the largest experiment in the field is the entire casino industry itself. Even the most miniscule effect would become galaringly obvious when you have a sample size probably in the hundreds of trillions (each spin of a slot machine and each bet on the roulette table is a sample).
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Either this story has been severely garbled by journalists or its an outright lie designed to get funding.
-- SIGFPE