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World's First Programmable Quantum Photonic Chip
MrSeb writes "A team of engineering geniuses from the University of Bristol, England has developed the world's first re-programmable, multi-purpose quantum photonic computer chip that relies on quantum entanglement to perform calculations. With multiple waveguide channels (made from standard silicon dioxide), and eight electrodes, the silicon chip is capable of repeatedly entangling photons. Depending on how the electrodes are programmed, different quantum states can be produced. The end result is two qubits that can be used to perform quantum computing. Most importantly, though, unlike existing quantum photonic setups which require apparatus the size of a 'large dining table,' this new chip is tiny: just 70mm (2.7 inches) by 3mm."
but can you link it to the inverted phase-induced sub-space harmonic protocol analyzer to initiate a modulated tachyon pulse?
For those who are unaware why qubits are so powerful: the computing power provided by qubits scales exponentially if compared to bits used in ordinary computing. For example if you had 20 qubits, that would be like doing simultaneous calculations on processor with internal register size of 1048576 bits. Roughly. That's orders of magnitude more than modern CPUs, which have about dozen of 64 bit registers.
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#\ @ ? Colonize Mars
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i know! one time i slept on about 60 cat-5 cables on a 200+ person man LAN, it wasn't too bad. maybe if i laid in bed, and then had the chips on top of me? thanks for the input though :) i slept next to my frigid bitch of a ex girlfriend, so if i can handle near absolute zero temperatures, this should be a walk in the park.
WÌÌfÍ--ÍSÌÒÍ...Í...ÌHÌÍfÍÍÍ--ÍÍÍ
It takes hours to sort them out afterwards.
If my call is important, why am I talking to a recording?
Unfortunately, after you program it you no longer know where it is.
That would be awesome to see - a hammock made of woven cat-5 cables.
Once saw the interconnect of a supercomputer/rack server "styled" into ocean waves, rather than just some snake-pit of cables.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
how many quantum computer groups are there likely to be in Bristol?
You can either know where they are, or how many there are - but not both.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If what you say is true, this is truly bad news for cryptography. Algorithms like AES owe their security largely to the fact that brute-forcing all of the keys is generally impractical; with a 256 qubit machine, AES 256 would be cracked in *a single clock cycle*.
If they can do this with two qubits, why not 4? Why not 8, or 128, or 512?
In the same way the WWII cipher designers probably had a hard time imagining that in 40 years there would exist a machine which could crack their ciphers in real time, the designers of block ciphers like DES and AES probably had a difficult time imagining that their ciphers would be insecure in mere decades. DES took 30 years before brute force became practical; will AES survive even 20?
It was just 20 years from the invention of the transistor to the first 32 bit computer. How long will it be before a machine with more computing power than in all of recorded history can be built on something the size of a postage stamp, for a few dollars?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
The computing part does indeed act on every combination your register can have at the same time. An exponential speedup here, that part is right. What is missing on your post is that reading the result is kind of hard. We only know how to get usefull data from a few kinds of calculation, and we don't know if it is possible to get anything usefull from the general case.
The good news is that if we ever discover a way to read the result of a general computation (if it is possible), we'd have discovered a nondeterministic computer. And forget about P ?= NP.
Rethinking email
Quantum computers are not "here" in any meaningful sense. Nobody ever has demonstrated a meaningful larger-numbers quantum computation (say, with numbers > 1000). At the moment, the there is no proof these will even work. It is still entirely feasible that the theory is wrong and large quantum computers are not possible or not useful. Even some tiny deviations from the current theory could cause that. Remember the results have to be physically measured and the input has to be physically put in. Both operations with huge, huge errors when compares to the precision classical computers achieve.
Then, even if meaningful sizes can be built (which is entirely unclear at this time) they are not effective or efficient for most problems.
Example: For breaking ciphers like AES, you get a square root on the key size, i.e. breaking AES-256 becomes as difficult as breaking AES-128 (both by brute force). Breaking AES-128 by brute force without quantum computers is quite infeasible in this universe. Breaking AES-256 by brute-force with quantum computers is quite infeasible in this universe as well.
Forget about any large data-set problems as well. Unlike classical computers, you cannot break problems down for quantum computers. You always have to solve the whole thing in one go, or you lose the advantages.
Bottom line: This is not a revolution, even if it turns out not to be bogus in the first place.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.