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Quantum Computing Without Qubits

Posted by samzenpus on from the making-it-work dept.

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."

3 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Something for nothing by WaffleMonster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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."

  2. Maybe Einstein gets the last laugh afterall? by nichogenius · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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!

    1. Re:Maybe Einstein gets the last laugh afterall? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Einstein invented quantum mechanics and you're an idiot.

      He was part of the group, he opposed the idea of randomness in quantum mechanics, since he firmly believed that determinism was a fundamental property of science.
      In a similar way Schrödinger opposed the idea of multiple states in quantum mechanics because of the implications it has when you apply it on macroscopic objects. The cat analogy was made to show that larger things like life and death becomes undefined if you allow a single particle to have an undefined state.

      Quantum mechanics has always been controversial, even to this day.