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."

Comments

Re:Sounds expensive

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh* then why are you reading "News for .." oh fuck, how long has that been gone? *le sigh*

Einstein was among the guys ...

[Taco Cowboy]

... 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