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Molecular Photography

Posted by michael on from the say-cheese dept.

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."

3 of 212 comments (clear)

  1. Re:That's pretty cool by pVoid · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I don't know how fast Quantum computers are going to make it into the mainstream. I find there is a lack of demand for such powerful computers at this point.

    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.

  2. To the future. by OpenGLFan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:Nice, Cool, Wow, but...... by delta407 · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It all depends on your perspective.
    No, it doesn't. There are a lot of technical hurdles to overcome with quantum computing, and this article discusses very few of them.

    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...)