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Molecular Photography
med dev writes "An article at New Scientist discusses the latest in quantum computing - 1000 bits stored in the electron spins of a single polymer molecule. Add in a recent release of the how-to for the complete quantum computer, qubits that work, and it may not be much longer before Google is running on a server the size of a sugar cube."
...is it clean in other dimensions?
"The lesson to be learned is not to take the comments on slashdot too literally." --Vinnie Falco, BearShare
Does anyone know if Synchrotrons, like the one in Saskatoon, SK, Canada play a part in researching molecular computers? The article mentions a magnetic imaging device. Is that like a synchrotron?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
So what happens if someone takes a picture of those atoms? Could they encode the atom's pictures on those atoms?
Sex - Find It
doesn't hitting it with the second radio burst kill the conformation you've made with the first?
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and isn't the first conformation likely to change spontaneously anyway (we're only talking about spin here, not orbitals). maybe they sit in the middle conformation or something, like benzene double bonds
i can feel the organic chem rusting in my brain weekly; it's almost gone now
Sure, biochemists might need the massively paralell processing power to do molecular folding analysis, but regular joe bloes will, IMHO, be very comfortable with quad 2GHz HT Pentium 4s... for a decade at least.
I feel there will be a rift like there was in the old days when mainframe systems were few and expensive, and the rest were smaller systems.
Frankly, Quantum doesn't titillate me as much as a nice new nVidida chip at this point.
The other thing is that massively powerfull paralel processing isn't always a Good Thing. It's just A Thing. Take for example early Pentium Pros which had 16 stage pipelines. Nice in concept, but unless you use it properly, it's not really usefull. Many problems aren't massively parallel... The brain for example, is massively parallel, but not in the sense that many mean: all of your brain isn't adding two million 4 bit integers at the same time. It's doing millions of different tasks...
Sunday night... must sleep... must shadap.
I have to wonder what type of redundancy and error correction will have to be built into quantum computing. With all sorts of EM disturbances that are recoverable in atomic-level computing like we have today, what will happen when we go that small? I'm not necessarily asserting that it will happen, but that we need to understand the phenomena in all sorts of usage, including high-altitude applications and cosmic rays. The one thing we take for granted in modern electronics, particularly storage devices, is their hard resiliency to soft errors (i.e. soft errors don't necessarily translate to hard errors).
To everyone who has so far commented: so what?
My mother was born in 1947. The transistor was also invented in 1947, by Shockley. 55 years later, I got her a new computer for Christmas.
What will I see when I turn 55? I can't wait to find out.
Will quantum computing make using database table indexes obsolete? ie. will the time saved by using an index be small enough that it's not worth the effort to create/maintain one (for most uses)?
Sounds like "what-if" analysis will be taken to a new extreme, big time.
I can argue of a future where the emphasis is on the Mobo that can house up to 32 CPUs. and the new AMD Thunderfolts that are so small you can actually fit 32 of them in a mini ATX case... With very low power consumption, and low heat emissions. And big hdd capacity, and loads of RAM, and high bandwidth, and this and that...
People will have many gimicks to market before they run out of ideas and turn back to the speed issue of a CPU.
Once again, IMHO.
Hmmm... you're being rather short-sighted here. This is not NMR like you've done.
I posted elsewhere in this article about NMR... if you want some details on how it's done, read my other post.
Anyway, they aren't using a commercial NMR device that you'd see in a biology/chemistry lab. I don't understand how it works myself, because I don't see determinism embedded in qubits, which have a random element.
The point is, they aren't measuring chemical shift, which is what it sounds like your NMR experience involved.
I get the impression they don't look at relaxation times at all. They are more interested in the bulk spin-state of the material, not in the interaction between the atoms in the material.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
For instance, it mentions that they used photons to carry information between ions. That's all well and good, but remember, working with single photons isn't all that easy to begin with, and that pesky Heisenberg guy keps getting in the way. Stray particles remain a problem. (Silicon computing has copper to carry electrons -- what do you to with individual photons?) Furthermore, it does not address the larger problem of decoherence, wherein the state of a quantum computation is lost after a short and unpredictable amount of time.
Really, what would be better is some great leap in quantum error correction or some quantum computer that does not rely on nuclear magnetic resonance. (NMR can only scale to seven or eight qubits before becoming unusable, at which point quantum computers are rather pointless...)
Blah blah blah
...and other neobabble.
The quantum states of phosphorus atoms are particularly long-lived,
The article tells us basically nothing real, except the names of a few people and that they're working on something called "quantum" computing.
So here's how it should work (off the top of my head):
An atom or molecule (a collection of particles) has a set of wave-equation solutions. Each of solutions corresponds to a single point in a lattice, whose coordinates are the quantum numbers; or a single value of an n-tuple whose indices are the quantum numbers; or a single member of a set of n-tuples each of which is identified by a unique combination of quantum numbers...however you want to express it. These quantum numbers are inserted into the wave equation and out pops a solution--a wave-function--that does not diverge or otherwise go kaput.
If the atom, molecule, collection of particles, etc., is in one state (one combination of quantum numbers; one wavefunction), it's just a matter of applying energy in the right way to push it into another state. The quantum numbers move to a new point in the lattice, you change the n-tuple indices, whatever. You really cause the wavefunction to change, and the spatial arrangement available to the particles moving in the system changes. A spherical shell becomes a dumb-bell shape (not really, but it's a simpler visual than what really happens, so go with it).
Now you have a binary memory system. Most systems have way more than two states, but only a few will be stable (metastable, actually) enough to be useful for computation. But trinary, quaternary, etc. are certainly not out of the question; though the question is a lot easier if you can still use all this software expertise that has binary math running through its veins.
Quantum calculations are a lot harder to grok than quantum memory. Something has to work so that the state of the memory actuates another part of the system to undergo a change on a quantum level from one stable state (n-tuple value/wavefunction) to another.
The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle would get involved, so the family of states you use would have to be pretty special to keep the particles in knowable states. I think that's what the reporter was really getting at when talking about the phosphorus thing.
>First of all, quantum computing is useless for >many of the things we now use computers for. To be a bit more precise. We don't know how to use quantum computing to perform many of the operations we currently do. Perhaps that has something to do with the near half a centry of work with digital logic, and the fact that there are basically no real quantum computers. >Second, use some common sense. Interface cables, removable media, et cetera. Is quantum >computing suddenly going to make those things shrink as well? Hell no. Well considering what was actually performed in this experiment was something analogous to memory backup, Hell yes. And judging from some of the research going on monitors might eventually become redundant. http://slashdot.org/articles/00/01/16/2244209.shtm l
Perhaps your entire server/interface will be smaller then a pin, and you will have it directly inserted into you brain.
Either there is new Grover's algorithm or you misunderstood something.
The original Grover's algorithm is for searching in unsorted database. Grover has shown that this takes only O(sqrt(n)) steps as opposed to O(n) on classical computer.
Grover's algorithm does not deal with sorted or indexed databases and I don't think it can be adapted to make advantage of the order of database elements. What it does is simply taking advantage that you can quickly enhance the probability of choosing element matching your search criteria from all possible elements.
To summarize: as far as I know noone has shown deterministic nor quantum search in ordered set to be below O(log n) in worst case.
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Well the part of this that actually stores data may be the size of a sugarcube, but if you've ever seen the size of a 400MHz NMR I think you might reconsider your statement. (oh, and leave your wallet at home when you go to work to avoid the NMR's huge magnet going through your credit cards.)