Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Quantum Mechanics
New submitter catchblue22 writes MIT Technology Review has an excellent article summarizing the current state of quantum computing. It focuses on the efforts of Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent's Bell Labs to build stable qubits over the past few years. "In 2012, physicists in the Netherlands announced a discovery in particle physics that started chatter about a Nobel Prize. Inside a tiny rod of semiconductor crystal chilled cooler than outer space, they had caught the first glimpse of a strange particle called the Majorana fermion, finally confirming a prediction made in 1937. It was an advance seemingly unrelated to the challenges of selling office productivity software or competing with Amazon in cloud computing, but Craig Mundie, then heading Microsoft's technology and research strategy, was delighted. The abstruse discovery — partly underwritten by Microsoft — was crucial to a project at the company aimed at making it possible to build immensely powerful computers that crunch data using quantum physics. "It was a pivotal moment," says Mundie. "This research was guiding us toward a way of realizing one of these systems."
It's actually quite the opposite. Microsoft has been funding basic quantum computing research via Microsoft Station Q for quite a while. These are mostly theorists, but they also fund some experimentalists, who work on the type of physics they are interested in. Google only recently purchased a box, about which D-wave claims it is a quantum computer.
Modded up, but essentially completely wrong considering this is research on types of generic quantum computers, something even D-Wave themselves admit to not doing, and has been going on for years.