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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."
If through quantum computing Microsoft is able to implement Windows search indexing in all Universes simultaneously, time will slow to the point where we can go faster than light.
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.
The chair is both thrown/not thrown at the same time, only the Balmer super computer can tell.
There's a big difference between buying a box and funding the research as Microsoft has done.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
It's all about closing the analog hole in DRM. Music will be delivered by a smooth Shroedinger wave evolution unless you record it to a cassette tape (analog) or Audacity (digital), which will collapse the wavefunction and kill the music. RIAA is pitching in to aid the research.
640 qbits ought to be enough for anyone.
(sorry, sorry, I won't let it happen again.)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
I thought the article had a fairly succinct criticism of D-Wave's computer:
Since 2009, Google has been testing a machine marketed by the startup D-Wave Systems as the world’s first commercial quantum computer, and in 2013 it bought a version of the machine that has 512 qubits. But those qubits are hard-wired into a circuit for a particular algorithm, limiting the range of problems they can work on. If successful, this approach would create the quantum-computing equivalent of a pair of pliers—a useful tool suited to only some tasks. The conventional approach being pursued by Microsoft offers a fully programmable computer—the equivalent of a full toolbox. And besides, independent researchers have been unable to confirm that D-Wave’s machine truly functions as a quantum computer. Google recently started its own hardware lab to try to create a version of the technology that delivers.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)
Microsoft does have a lot of experience with the principles of quantum mechanics. Users of their software are constantly struggling with the uncertainty principle and can often make a system collapse merely by observing it.
Microsoft does have a lot of experience with the principles of quantum mechanics.
Joking aside I'd estimate it as about as much experience as the GP has with particle physics i.e. close to none. Particle physics is concerned with fundamental particles not with condensed matter states that might behave consistently with a theoretical prediction of how a Majorana fermion would behave. The fact that they dress this up as particle physics is rather sad: condensed matter physics is just as interesting!