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Quantum Computer Demoed, Plays Sudoku
prostoalex writes "Canadian company D-Wave Systems is getting some technology press buzz after successfully demonstrating their quantum computer (discussed here earlier) that the company plans to rent out. Scientific American has a more technical description of how the quantum computer works, as well as possible areas of application: 'The quantum computer was given three problems to solve: searching for molecular structures that match a target molecule, creating a complicated seating plan, and filling in Sudoku puzzles.' Another attendee provides some videos from the demo." Anyone want to guess how long before "qubit" gets compressed to "quit" (as "bigit" became "bit" in the last century)?
That would lead to a revolution in efficiency of everything from travel to mass transit to shipping.
Certainly a better example than a Sudoku solver... all a Sudoku puzzle is, at it's core, is a depth first search. You can speed up the algorithm with Dancing Links, but even on a moderately fast PC a DFS is fast enough to get a solution to a Sudoku puzzle in the blink of an eye.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these running Linux!
I would call it a 'qit' personally pronounced like 'kit'. But what do I know? I'm just lazy.