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First Quantum Byte Created
gila_monster writes "Juice Enews Daily is reporting that the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the University of Innsbruck in Austria has created an entanglement of eight quantum particles, yielding a quantum byte or 'qubyte,' or eight qubits. The formal paper was published in the December 1 issue of Nature. A qubyte with eight ions provides a computing matrix of 65536 mostly independent elements. No word in the article about whether they were able to actually use the qubyte for computing."
No word in the article about whether they were able to actually use the qubyte for computing
I think we can be sure that if somebody had unlocked the secret of quantum computing there's a chance they'd say so at some point.
Wasn't there some news recently that the so called quantum bits could be read without disturbing their state.
Which would either break quantum theory, or would mean they are just fabricated bits of information and not quantum bits at all.
The article was here
liqbase
"God, what's a qubit?"
The opposite of progress is congress
Wouldn't a qubyte just provide an indeteminate number of somewhere between 0 and 255 zombie cats?
Seriously, how do they get a 16 bit number out of an 8 bit qubyte?
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
The phrase "mostly independent" doesn't sound completely reliable to me in a world where a single 0 or 1 can change the entire meaning of data or functionality of software.
Still, with some engineering experience it's easy to fill in what the article omits. Science moved forward and technology implementations will catch up and find a way to overcome issues like these. In fact, some data mirroring with checksums might already be more than sufficient and quantum particles offer sufficient improvements in data/space ratios that duplication should not be a concern.
... Eight qubits? ISTR that Shor's original quantum error correction code requires nine, and there are simpler codes requiring fewer. We're getting here into a scale where some very interesting features of quantum computation can be demonstrated.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Why did they choose eight 'bits' for their quantum 'byte'? For historical reasons, or is there a logical reason to choose eight? Why not seven, or 42?
I'm not being entirely frivolous - I understand quantum computing is radically different from today's architectures and so don't understand why they are choosing a byte size based on what seems to me to be historical factors.
Might be some use then ;-)
Get the EULA T-shirt
"This is an important step toward the realization of a practical quantum computer, which would use superposed quantum states to perform complex calculations." Seems like they haven't been able to actually compute anything with it yet.
1) Are they certain?
2) What do qbit bytes taste like?
3) So is this cat dead or what?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
Today, a qubit. In a couple of decades, a functional quantum computer. At the risk of being hyperbolic, it will do for secrecy and privacy what the atomic bomb did for international conflict.
Unless quantum cryptography gets there first. The race is on.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
What does "computing matrix of 65536 mostly independent elements" mean? If it is not exactly 65536, then it is not 8 bits. What am I missing?
Am i reading this right that instead of the datatraffic as we know it, they would be sending qubytes and we'd get data depending on the state of that qubyte? How is this going to work? I mean, all datatraffic as we have it now (POTS, ISDN, Fibre etc) is all based on "bursts" (think 0/1 volts, lightshocks etc) right?
Okay, so im completely confused here, i'll readily admit it. But then, im no quantumphysics expert by any means either.
Would anyone care to enlighten me?
"Sarcasm is for *winners*, Alan." - Charlie Harper (Two and a Half Men)
They say that a Qbyte is an array of 256x256. I thought that Qbits represented a complex real number, it seems to me now that it represents a complex boolean number, like : (0 OR 1) + j*(0 OR 1). Did I get it right?
You just got troll'd!
We need a few more before quantum porn.
Think about it..any kind of porn in one file..
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
...supposing that there's an infinite hierarchy of subatomic organization...oh wait, they already did this in Hitchhiker's Guide, didn't they? Never mind...
Make that the first *simulated* qubyte. we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation http://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.html
Let us all take a minute to reflect on all the cats who died in support of this research.
Or maybe they didn't.
"That's not a bug, that's a quantum singularity!"
Stéphane "Alias" Gallay
Now, where did I put this witty quote?..
Maybe we can finally figure out what happened to that dang cat.
But will it run Linux?
... build a Linux Box 40 Qubits in size....
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
Do we really need this? I can't imagine how anybody will have usage for more that four qubits anyway. When will the madness stop?
TC - My Photos..
My laymans understanding of quantum computing is that it will enable massively parallel calculations to occur simulataneously.
The problem however is that you get all the answers simultaneously, and that the *real* problem is then finding efficient algorithms to search the results space.
Could someone who actually knows what that all means dumb it down to our level, and explain how quantum computing will actually be useful?
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
I found this at Caltech, a piece on quantum computers. I've never really taken quantum computation seriously -- it just seemed too far-fetched. If they've really got 8-bits, maybe quantum computing will matter in my lifetime.
From reading the piece, it sounds like we will have some major problems with our current cryptographic systems if quantum computers become available.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
"With a trap using magnetic fields they captured eight calcium ions, lined them up, and set up them in "W states" using a complicated laser technology"
Calcium again coming to the rescue to provide structure for a complex system. What would people or quantum computers be without it?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Maybe once they impliment it they will finally be able to make some AI that will kill us all eventually. Lets hope if that happens that they don't let the machines see the matrix.
From the "article": "This experiment proves that the kind of ion traps used in Innsbruck are the most promising technology for the realization of large computing matrices."
This is the kind of press release with a primary message of "Dump huge buckets of cash HERE." No harm in that, Innsbruck needs to stump for research money like any University, but where do we find a comparitive check on _other_ technologies for realization of large computing matrices? The minimal description given of the Innsbuck device sounds way to complex and expensive for scaling up to "large computing matrices."
Anyone got nice links on other methods?
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced. - Geek's corollary to Clarke's law
modded this "troll"? Clearly this is a variant on the usual "4k should be enough..." thing. It is a JOKE.
FTA: With a trap using magnetic fields they captured eight calcium ions
So, I guess floppy disks would be ruled out at this point.
I was born in 1983, but now I can re-experience even advances in computing that happened in the seventies and before! Cabinet-sized hard-drives that hold a couple of megabytes? Quantum computing is at A FEW QUBITS! I doubt many people here lived through the ENIAC (and realized what it meant at the time), but that's exactly what my grandchildren will be hearing from me. Granson, back in my day we had EIGHT QUBITS! Not qubytes, QUBITS, sonny boy, eight of 'em. Like this: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. Total. And that was state of the art. It was a research demonstration! And we liked it!
"There is a world market for 4, maybe 5 quantum computers."
"512 kiloqubytes outta' be enough for anybody!"
Etc, etc, etc. WHOOOHOO!!! I was there at ground zero, baby!!! In ought six!!!!
What do you mean ought-six, grandpa? "I mean 2006, granson".
"Whoa! When were you born?"
"I was born in the LAST MILENNIUM, GRANSON"
"Did they have cars?"
"Just road ones."
"What about Google?"
"yeah, but it wasn't like today. Man I wish I'd have held on to that stock tho'..."
If a qubit has 4 states, shouldn't a qubyte just be two qubits?
I mean if the switch to quantium computing means a totally different way of talking about how data is measured, that will cause a lot of confusion and mayhem in the market.
You mean that if advanced machines exterminate the human race, we should hope that they wouldn't get the idea of "reconstructing" the human race, and then build a huge computer simulator to let us continue our lives in ignorance inside a simulation of the long lost past? ...that sounds like a REALLY mean thing to do...
Actually, there was an announcement, but they used their qubit to crack your ssh key in five seconds and deleted it from your email.
and it only costs 89$ and is avaibble for MACs too http://www.advancedliving.com/item97179.ctlg
anywhere between 0 and 65536, there's no way to be sure.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
or is this discovery here to prove how primitive we still are?
Instead of thinking 'Wow, science has really evolved', look at the article from the 2900 perspective:
Two classmates:
- Hey, those apes in 2005 were celebrating the first quantum byte!
- Hehe, lol, gimme the ketchup! Yeah... We now have like...thousands of those... hehe.
Bad mods.
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
If I had mod points I would have given you a +1 funny.
What's really sad about your joke (yes, I got it) is that most of the young whipper snappers on Slashdot probably weren't even born when that game first came out. THAT'S really disgusting to think about it, particulrly since I was playing that when it first came out in the arcades. *shudder*
Anonymous Coward is on a text based browser right now, so I have to log in to reply. Anyway, here's the philosopher's song: mp3 file.
You crappy mods should listen to it. Maybe it'll help your sense of humour!
When do we get an Improbability Drive?
"I'm just here to regulate funkiness."
More like rubbery than flexible.
AFAIK, the only problem QCs are good at solving is factoring (and the discrete logarithm problem which is equivalent). Does anyone know a complete list of problems they are supposed to be good for? I don't think it's very long. OTOH, research may provide more over time.
A qubyte with eight ions provides a computing matrix of 65536 mostly independent elements.
What does it mean by computing matrix and independent elements? Any Slashdotters familiar with the terms?
Don't take life so seriously. No one makes it out alive.
And this is news? Shoot, I played Qbert years ago!
Oh, you said qubit...
taking about unlocking the secret of quatum computing, it maybe possible unlike how people think they aren't possible or difficult to achieve just as people say perpetual motion machines cant be achieved.
let's see what this web site below have to say about the true perpetual motion machines:
http://ddnpmfng.tripod.com/
Thanks,
Dominic and Donatus Nwaogu
DDNPMF Nigeria
My last computer had a 40 Gigabyte Quantum Hard Drive!
640KQb Should Be Enough for Anybody.
-- Anonymous Coward
People have been expecting quantum computing to take off in a big way but after a couple of decades of research we still have only machines with a handful of qubits. I claimed from day one that the difficulty of building a quantum computer with memory N goes up exponentially. Because of Moore's law type effects our ability to build computers goes up exponentially. The net result is that I expect the memory of quantum computers to go up linearly over time, not exponentially like classical computers. I think we're seeing this borne out over the years. So don't expect quantum algorithms to crack codes any time soon. For what it's worth, I think the claims of scalability in the article are BS - but we'll see...
I could only to the tenth pyramid most of the time. Damn springy snake things...
... what did you expect, something profound?
A bit is an atom of information, the smallest meaningful particle that can be represented in a system. A bit (binary digit in classical computer science has only two possible values because a digit in binary only has two possible values. The atomic particle of information in quantum computing, however, has four possible states. This means that the smallest possible quantum representation (the qubit) can represent four states. A qubyte, being 8 qubits, holds far more information than a traditional byte.
Really? How do you pronounce that?
You're attempting to measure a quantum system in binary terms. A traditional bit (binary digit), the atomic particle of the binary system, can only hold two possible values. A traditional byte is eight (or seven, depending on your protocol) bits.
But qubits, the atomic particle of the quantum system, can hold four possible values. A qubyte, being eight qbits, holds a far greater amount of information than a traditional byte.
Your confustion stems from applying the binary term to the quantum system without doing the conversion arithmetic.
Which means there should be a 16 qbit machine by 2025, the 32 qbit machine by 2045... hmm. How unhelpful.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
Does this mean there will be more than just 1s and 0s when it comes to things? Will there be more complex things going on?
A neophyte question : let's assume we have quantum computers. According to what I read, the actual public-key cryptography methods would be cracked in a couple of seconds with such kind of computers.
However, would there be new public-key cryptography methods available, which cannot be cracked with these computers ? Probably these methods would need a quantic computer to be implemented themselves, but does the power of quantic computer be enough to simply "scale up" the actual public-key cryptography algorithms ?
Many thanks for explanations.
...the qubits are being discrete about their "entanglement."
So how will they calculate the parity qubits?
I wonder if Bill Gates will say that 256cubits of memory will be more than enough memory for everyone.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I'm just waiting for a decent capacity drive (75-100gb) to last more than 5 years..
It's true that with a quantum computer you could easily break today's implementation of encryption but in theory quantum encryption will be unbreakable, even by other quantum computers, because of the nature of state in quantum mechanics. Although surely after the first quantum VPN it will only take a century or so to create some radically new type of computing that will break it. That is the nature of technology. Thank goodness for job security.
Encryption: I may not agree with what you say, but I will defend your right to encrypt it...
"Hey, look at my new quantum USB drive"
"Where is it?"
"Oh, it instantly dissappears when you look in its direction, but trust me, its there"
"Dude..."
"Wait! Just look at the new drive letter in My Compute...DAMN I've been had."
You guys asleep? I'm surprised nobody caught my typo.
Those of us with 8-bit keys are really worried now.
Stephen
Well, I guess that just proves that everything that comes around goes around... even after 3,000 years!
Jho
Sorry man... the Internet pooped on me.
Viva la France!
News today shows that recent advances in quantum design have produced the first quantum sprite for a game. The game, called Q*bert uses cutting edge isomorphic graphics to allow a player to navigate a three dimensional map.
There is no news as to whether the game will actually be used for entertainment.
I wouldn't consider the mad hatter mad. Just reality impaired. He sure can make a mean cup of tea.
...a quantum byte or 'qubyte,' or eight qubits.
10 qubits if you selling hard drives.
lose != loose
When released, it will power the Phantom Console and run Duke Nukem Forever.
Enough with the masturbation jokes already...
RoseColor red={0, 0xffff, 0x0000, 0x0000};VioletColour blue={0, 0x0000, 0x0000, 0xffff};find / -name *mybase*|chown you
Anti-Semitism this exaggerated, I thought, could only be a twisted attempt at irony. Then I read some of your other comments, which range from the vaguely hostile towards Jews to the circumstantially Buchananesque.
Moderators, putko's intolerant, ignorant filth is an embarrassment to us all. Check his posting history and drive him to -1 where he belongs.
But is the pussy alive or dead? Beastality or necrophilia are two completely different areas of porn and discriminating viewers need to know!
The one on my shoulder or the oozing pussy in the boots? Obviously any brand of shoe named PUSSY is dead, until you put somthing inside it. That reminds me...abatement to that Reebok salesman in the Westminster mall: I don't plan on any future undertakings, you confusing my wandering eyes gandering upon the stacks of bio-oderous shoes splattered on the wall, with being an estranged necrophilliac looking to buy his bi-quarterly mended souls from your slave-laborers in the overseas mortgage realms, is not fanciful at all and I hereby conceive to an exit() from whence your store swalled me alive into its crypt.
I've been a long-time fan of quantum sign since -- I can't remember.
without prejudice
Time to upgrade all those 8-bit key pairs I have lying around, now that they can be cracked in polynomial time.
I was in quantum information about ten years ago, and if I understand this correctly, the relationship between a qubit and this "qubyte" is not analogous to the relationship between a bit and a byte. A "qubit" does not require entanglement to be a qubit; it is just a two-state quantum system, like an electron (spin-up/spin-down) or a photon (horizontal/vertical polarization). Eight qubits would just be eight electrons; they wouldn't need to be entangled.
> I think we can be sure that if somebody had unlocked
> the secret of quantum computing there's a chance
> they'd say so at some point.
But we can't predict whether they would actually say so, we can only calculate the probability.
Actually, the thing that threw me was the word "mostly".
How can the elements be "mostly independent"?
Either they're independent or they aren't, right?
What do they mean by "mostly"?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Quantum Encryption's only useful if you've got a direct fiber or line-of-sight optical connection to the other party, which is to say it's almost never practical. Also, it seems to need some conventional-crypto help to make it both untappable and also reliable. If you're going to do that, you might as well use conventional crypto - symmetric crypto with long enough keys isn't bothered by quantum computing, and if public-key algorithms become obsolete, you can fall back to either key-distribution-center systems like Kerberos or else to guys with briefcases handcuffed to their arms. Both of those methods are less convenient than public-key crypto, but they're no worse than installing dedicated fiber.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Elliptic Curve problems aren't known to be solvable by QCs, but they're still new enough in cryptography that nobody trusts them quite as much as the RSA and DH - we'll have to see if a serious QC gets developed before the patents on some types of EC crypto run out :-)
Conventional symmetric crypto is also affected - the general estimate seems to be a square-root factor, which is equivalent to saying that the effective key length gets cut in half. So you need to use conventional crypto with longer keys, such as 256-bit AES instead of 128-bit, but the basic technology still works. So it's possible to use symmetric-key crypto for session encryption and go back to Kerberos and similar Key-Distribution-Center approaches to session key distribution.
I don't remember if there are Digital Signature methods that survive, other than secret-key approaches like HMACs, plus the ECC versions that are currently sitting in a box with Schroedinger's cat.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
To be exact, byte is just a unit of computing, and it can contain arbitrary number of bits. While 8-bit byte, also known as octet, is by far the most popular, reaching the boundary of 8 bits doesn't change anything except for a small scaling factor. All the computations that can be performed on 8-bit bytes can be just as well performed on 6-bit, 9-bit or whatever-you-choose-bit bytes.
But it doesn't really matter, because QCs are much more useful for specialized types of problems than for the types of gamer-box graphical rendering that uses up most of the world's CPU capacity today. Ray tracing wants the kind of parallelism that generates lots of output in parallel, and it's a good job for relatively conventional computing. QC produces small amounts of output extracted from a really large search space, such as finding the two 1000-bit prime factors of a 2000-bit number - once you've found the answer, the amount of work to verify that it's correct is very small, but finding it using conventional computers is roughly exponentially hard.
That doesn't mean that gamers won't find uses for the things if they become available, but you'd be using them to crack the security of the database that tracks where your buddy is and what equipment he's got, not to draw the pretty picture after you've made his armor vanish and fragged him.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Many mathematicians drink black coffee or espresso, but having calcium-containing milk around does make it possible to have cappuccino if you're civilized or at least have white powder stuff to dilute vending-machine coffee if you're a traditional academic researcher.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
The IQOQIUIA?
No I dont think they should exterminate us period LOL. AI... BAD IDEA
At Keio Techno-Mall 2005, a show by Keio University showing off new technologies. Japanese and foreign (American?) researcher. Haven't read the paper he gave me but apparently they have 1 qubit so far but using an element that retains quantum state for 15 seconds!! In fact it is extremely hard to influence the state which is the drawback. But they think it might be useful as a kind of a "hard disk" for a quantum computer. Next step is to get more qubits in one place, apparently.