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Breakthrough for Quantum Measurement
said_captain_said_wo writes to tell us that PhysicsWeb is reporting that two teams of physicists have developed a new method for measuring the state of quantum bits in a quantum computer without disturbing the state. From the article: "In the future, the Josephson capacitance could be used for operations in a large-scale quantum computer," says Mika Sillanpaa of Helsinki University. "The Josephson inductance and Josephson capacitance together would also allow us to build new types of quantum 'band engineered' electronic devices, such as low-noise parametric amplifiers."
Wouldnt this violate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?
juz wondering.. would this result mean anything to the already available systems whereby quantum properties are used to securely send data from point to point??
In particular, something like rendering an environment in real-time won't be helped because there's an unpredictable input (the human).
Durring the 1/60th (or less) of a second that your system is rendering a single frame in that game, the state of the scene and all objects (as well as light positions, textures, and overlays) is very static. It just doesn't seem like it to you, because you are very slow compared to your computer.
There could be hundreds of applications of a Quantum Co-Processor in a game, from testing for occlusion in a 3D scene, to making AI decisions in computer controlled characters.
Quantum Computing may very well not be immediately useful in many traditional computation tasks ("While this value is true then do that") but it will open up whole new ways of tackling processes that are time consuming with today's methods ("do any of these things give us this, that, or something in between?").
Just thinking about it gives me that Fuzzy Logic Feeling...
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
"The author changed the article by writing it" may be the best analogy to quantum computing I've run into. At the moment he finished the article, the author caused the article to collapse from all the articles it might have been the the article it actually was. As he was writing it, it simultaneously passed through all the possible articles (states) it might have been, to become the final article (state). Becoming is infinite, being is finite.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I shall consider myself lightened-up :) But seriously, it's not obvious to me that it would be useful for calculating results in quantum physics, just because it is based on that theory. Sounds likely, but IANAQP. "Obvious" and "quantum physics" aren't words I normally encounter close to one another ;)
Why do you think the human observer is more special than the ant? Why don't you believe that when you open the box you become correlated with both the ant and the cat, and enter a state which is a mixture of you seeing a dead cat and seeing a live cat - with your own two states each, as you say, "unaware of the other?"
That's what the many-worlds interpretation is all about, not some sci-fi multiple universes schtick we always run across.
"But all your emitter and collector are belong to me!"
But if you think abuot it, all our algorithms are probabilistic. At any moment, e.g., a stray cosmic ray could flip a bit in your computer causing a calculation to give an incorrect answer. There's no way to be 100% sure that the result of a computer's calculation is accurate. It may _seem_ less reliable to depend on a quantum calculation, but you can always run the calculation enough times that the probability that you have the wrong answer is no worse than the probability that a standard computer malfunctioned.