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Quantum Computing Without Qubits
An anonymous reader shares this interview with quantum computing pioneer Ivan Deutsch. "For more than 20 years, Ivan H. Deutsch has struggled to design the guts of a working quantum computer. He has not been alone. The quest to harness the computational might of quantum weirdness continues to occupy hundreds of researchers around the world. Why hasn't there been more to show for their work? As physicists have known since quantum computing's beginnings, the same characteristics that make quantum computing exponentially powerful also make it devilishly difficult to control. The quantum computing 'nightmare' has always been that a quantum computer's advantages in speed would be wiped out by the machine's complexity. Yet progress is arriving on two main fronts. First, researchers are developing unique quantum error-correction techniques that will help keep quantum processors up and running for the time needed to complete a calculation. Second, physicists are working with so-called analog quantum simulators — machines that can't act like a general-purpose computer, but rather are designed to explore specific problems in quantum physics. A classical computer would have to run for thousands of years to compute the quantum equations of motion for just 100 atoms. A quantum simulator could do it in less than a second."
I have this impression of "quantum simulator" analog computers, that if you want to make them truly capable, you have to give them the ability to blow up by overloading themselves, sort of like blowing an amp. Comments?
Look in the sky, see the flock of starlings?
The dark clump of birds that you can see will dart around, sometimes here, sometimes there. It can fly west and yet clump east, time-travel! Must be negative time! Sometimes simultaneously appearing in two places. Faster than light travel! Sometimes no clump can be seen. Where'd they go? Poof, out of existence.
You want a quantum simulator? Starlings, go watch a flock of starlings and apply your quantum equations to their motion.
You may think I'm kidding, but the same problem exists. Just as you can't see the individual bird, only the flock, likewise you've built a bunch of equations for a flock of smaller particles. You can only detect the flock and not the particles.
*sigh* then why are you reading "News for .." oh fuck, how long has that been gone? *le sigh*
... if you know the computer's speed, you cannot know where the computer is.
Before I die, I would love to see just one universal logical qubit that can be indefinitely error corrected. It would instantly be classified by the government, of course.
Jesus fuck, who thinks that this crank is worthy of an interview? Classified information is purely a product of the government. They can't just classify information produced by citizens (citation: the first fucking ammendment, you dumbass crank). Case in point: it looks like D-Wave is getting close to beating out classical computing on some problems, and "the government" is... a customer. And apparently not storming their offices in jackboots to shut them down.
I would've preferred "Noble Steed," but I'll take it.
coding is life
I don't believe in real quantum computers because they require operating on the premise you can just sit there and extract whatever unlimited amounts of computation from the universe for a cost exponentially approaching free.
No doubt at all these machines given enough time and effort will work and they will provide the world with useful benefits only those benefits will look nothing like:
"Problems that would take a state-of-the-art classical computer the age of our universe to solve, can, in theory, be solved by a universal quantum computer in hours."
Finally, someone realizes that quantum computing is a fucking dead end.
I suppose naming analog computers quantum simulators somehow renders them hip and more useful than just calling them analog computers.
Einstein never really accepted quantum mechanics. I sometimes wonder if the issues regarding quantum computing are a little more fundamental than technological. Maybe that old genius was smarter than we give him credit for!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
Ewige Blumenkraft.
The proposal for the quantum simulator was made back in 1982
In 2011 paper was already written about the matter
http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6457
... Einstein invented quantum mechanics and you're an idiot ...
Albert Einstein is one of the guys that I truly respect, but I still gotta say that Quantum Mechanics was not invented by Einstein alone ... Other people such as Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Louis de Broglie, Arthur Compton, Erwin Schrodinger, Max Born, John von Neumann, Paul Dirac, Enrico Fermi, Wolfgang Pauli, Max von Laue, Freeman Dyson, David Hilbert, Wilhelm Wien, Satyendra Nath Bose, Arnold Sommerfeld, amongst many others, also have contributed to the theory of Quantum Mechanics
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Pilot Wave Theory
-Promises of all the same results as QM, but without the nagging wooo.
Or so I've read.
Isn't the whole point that you don't know if the cat is alive or dead, and no matter how smart your calculations, you're never going to get an angle on the answer until you open the stupid box.
Seriously; the race for the Quantum Computer seems a whole lot like the search for perpetual motion using magnets and Lego, -but with billion-dollar investment and nobody laughing. No wonder science geeks are so petrified of tin foil. They constantly fall for the dumbest stuff, and it takes generations to figure it out.
And if you fly two flocks into each other at the right velocity, for a moment you can see them fly in what we experts calls a 'Higgs Boson' formation!
But there is a risk of catastrophic bird poop aftermath. Who knew that dark matter would smell so bad.
Quantum Computing: the String Theory of computation.
> A classical computer would have to run for thousands of years to compute the quantum equations of motion for just 100 atoms.
But is it web-scale?
I noticed a lot of posts proclaiming quantum computers will never exists, but they actually already do exist: In 2001, researchers demonstrated Shor's algorithm to factor 15 using a 7-qubit NMR computer.(http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing) Just because the next advancement is hard doesn't mean it's impossible. We've gotten so accustomed to a limited set of technology improving we've lost our sense of how long it takes to solve entirely new classes of problems. Think how long modern computers were speculated about, but it took a few key advancements to make it actually happen. QC is the same and the naysayers will look pretty foolish to future generations. To be clear, we have real and functioning quantum computers abs there's significant incentive to scale them up.
Quantum computing is a hoax, will never happen. Quantum effects are just an illusion.
How did the GP get +5? It is a bunch of BS and has nothing to do with real quantum computers as the parent here points out.
"A classical computer would have to run for thousands of years to compute the quantum equations of motion for just 100 atoms. A quantum simulator could do it in less than a second."
...and a hundred atoms can do it in real time!
http://www.geoffreylandis.com