U of Michigan creates first Quantum Microchip

zigziggityzoo writes "According to this article, The University of Michigan has created the first Quantum Microchip, which could eventually lead to the first instance of Quantum Computing ever." The bad news? We won't be seeing any notebooks or handhelds with quantum chips in the near future.

Comments

How many Qubits?

[Anonymous Coward]

The deparment new service article has a few more details. They don't state it explictly, but it seems to be implied that is only 1-qubit.

So, they still have a ways to go if they haven't achieved a 2-qubit entanglement yet, but it is at least a manfacturing advance.

Here's a Question for you:

[SnoopJeDi]

From TFA:

Researchers believe quantum systems will be much more efficient at rock-solid cryptography and mass database searches than running the latest version of Doom.

Any particular reason why? I mean, bits are bits, are they not? Or is this saying a game architechture couldn't take advantage of a qubit?

The Power of Quantum Computers is a good insight into just why this is a good system for factorization, and thus, breaking the stuffing out of encryption systems.

Re:But will it run Linux?

[Craigj0]

Actually for some people there are reasons to move beyond 64 bits besides address space. There are a lot of processors that are used in DSP that work on >64 bit intergers. However for a general purpose machine proccessing of large intergers is probably better off in specialised units like altivec.
As a side note current 64 bit processors only actually can access about 40-45 bits of address space since all those extra pins cost money and are unlikely to be used.

The internet was predicted 60 years ago.

[SETIGuy]

... Remember research 50 years ago? Huge, vacuum tubes, hundreds of calculations a second (maybe). They thought the world would have maybe 5-10 computers. Who envisioned Doom, or the Internet?

Actually, I'd say that in 1946 (yes, 60 years ago) Murray Leinster essentially predicted the internet. Although he didn't predict how it worked, he certainly predicted computers in the home searching centralized data repositories. Here's an excerpt from "A Logic Named Joe."

You know the logics setup. You got a logic in your house. It looks like a vision reciever used to, only it's got keys instead of dials and you punch keys for what you wanna get. [...] Say you punch "Station SNAFU" on your logic. Relays in the tank take over an' whatever vision program SNAFU is telecastin' comes on your logic's screen. Or you punch "Sally Hancock's Phone" an' the screen blinks an' sputters an' you're hooked up with the logic in her house an' if somebody answers youve got a vision-phone connection. But besides that, if you punch for the weather forecast or who won today's race at Hialeah or who was mistress at the White House durin' Garfield's administration or what is PDQ and R sellin' for today, that comes on the screen, too. [...] Also it does math for you, an' keeps books, an' acts as consulting chemist, physicist, astronomer an' tealeaf reader, with an "Advice to Lovelorn" thrown in.

Not too far off the mark for 1946.

Re:But will it run Linux?

[sigloiv]

His point is, even if you need over 17 GBs of RAM, it'd be far more efficient to just split up that RAM among multiple 64-bit processors. I mean, by the time we have 17 exabytes of RAM, they're will probably 1000 core 64-bit processors. ;)

First Ever? It's been done before!

[ironwill96]

I seem to recall that an article was posted on /. a few months ago about this as found here: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/ 07/1241216

And here is the company's webpage: http://atomchip.com/_wsn/page5.html

See! Proof that Quantum-Optical computing has already been done!

Ok, so maybe this would be the first non-vaporware quantum chip...

A stab in the dark

[zbuffered]

Cheap power supply?

Re:Enigmatic?

[bhaberman]

It's enigmatic because while these vectors are eigenfunctions of the Schroedinger equation, meaning that they represent a definite state, the sum of these two vectors is NOT an eigenfunction. It is weird that a particle simply walks around with a state not corresponding to any definite eigenstate. It is also weird that when you try to catch the particle in the act, the particles state collapses to that of one of the eigenstates of which it is in the superposition, with probability given by taken the scalar product with the eigenstate in question. This means that when not being measured, particles evolve according to the (deterministic) Schroedinger equation, while when the particles are measured they (randomly) perform a quantum leap into just one eigenstate, and then continue on their Schroedinger evolution.

This is
a. Counterintuitive. How can these particles walk around with indefinite states?
b. Disturbing. How does measurement make them choose a state; what is the privilidged status of measurement in the universe; does it have a true state?
c. Mathematically sophisticated. The details of quantum mechanics require infinite-dimensional Hilbert space theory, much of which has been developed during the 20th century. Things like the spectral theorem are mathematically very difficult and are necessary for quantum mechanics. It is not true that people learn what a Hilbert space is in the first year of undergraduate mathematics. Hey, even people in their senior year of college might not know what it is, let alone how to use its properties.

Don't say quantum mechanics is simple. It is one of the strangest theories ever developed by science, and should be thrown out altogether as ridiculous, if it weren't for the fact that it explains observations very well.

Re:Schrodinger's computer

[drgonzo59]

Agree. I would even go futher and say that even some drivers should not be able to crash the operating system. If some idiot at Microsoft wrote my PS/2 mouse driver or some contractor monkey wrote a buggy graphics driver -- it shouldn't bring down the whole machine, but rather the machine should be able to detect a problem and restart the driver and the device or try to autmatically fall back to use a generic failsafe driver. I would want to have a good free OS with a separation kernel and userspace drivers. Sorry but Minix and Hurd just don't cut it yet. I remember the Andrew Tanenbaum vs. Linus debate over the best kernel architecture, and while back in the early 90's on a 33 MHz 386 processor context switches between drivers would have been too prohibitive, today with the 3GHz CPUs and gigabit memory bandwidths, it might just work. Some people will agree to sacrifice %15 or so of performance to increased reliability and fault tollerance. Even without any specific changes in programming practices going from 5,000,000 lines of code that could potentially run in priviledged mode to only 5000 would make a HUGE difference in terms of stability and fault tollerance. Who knows, maybe it's time to rethink?...

Re:Schrodinger's computer

[Z34107]

I'm trying to edit something on a windows system right now and it crashes four to five times an hour

Ever consider it's not Windows' fault? I dual boot Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 R2. Granted, I used to get occaisional crashes playing games in XP - until I disabled the Realtek integrated sound chip and got an Audigy.

The only crashes I ever get are when I'm using beta nVidia graphics drivers, or when I make a stupid programming mistake, like off-by-one errors or checking pointers. The latter happens rarely, due to my incredible programming skill :D, and is caught by my IDE and never affects system stability. All in all, when I have programming classes, call it less than 4 crashes a month.

I'm still trying to find out what people do to their poor machines in order to make them so horribly unstable, or what people do to their e-mail accounts to get so much spam. (I've had a free netscape account since I was 11 - never any spam.) Maybe it's not Windows?

Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.