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Quantum Computing Programming Language

Posted by timothy on from the boy-scout-motto dept.

William Walker writes "The Economist has an article in its new issue describing attempts to write a programming language for quantum computers, if and when they appear. It does a good job of putting the challenges of qubits versus regular bits into layman's terms. ... The original paper is here."

1 of 232 comments (clear)

  1. Seen Quantum::Superpositions by legLess · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Perl's had support for quantum computing for three years, thanks to Damian Conway's Quantum::Superpositions module. I saw him do a presentation in Portland few months back, and it was pretty mind-blowing. It may seem odd to talk about programming a computer that doesn't exists yet, but Q::S actually works.

    The promise of quantum computers is doing computations (as Damian says) "in multiple universes, in constant time" and Q::S obviously can't do this. It can and does, however, act like you're programming a quantum computer by allowing you to give one scalar multiple simultaneous values.

    Like Perl wasn't confusing enough, now it's like programming line noise ... in multiple universes :)

    --
    This isn't as much "normalization" as it is "don't take so many drugs when you're designing tables."