BetaBenj sent us the latest update from
TechWeb concerning the latest advances in solid quantum computing. Recently, there have been a couple key advances bringing us closer-but we're still a ways out. Still, the ramifications of it are
almost as staggering as nanotech. Almost.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the most interesting things the article mentioned (I thought) was that the thing that "galvanized" research into quantum computing was a report that showed a quantum computer could break virtually any digital security system.
Keeping that statement in mind, is it any wonder why people get excited about breaking into a secure computer system? Most mainstream people are appalled at crackers attempting to gain access to a secure system, yet here the same impulse is driving research that could fundamentally change our lives.
I just always find it interesting when human nature morally cris-crosses itself....
--Mid
Life spans keep getting longer. Why do you assume that you won't be alive in 100 years?
Of course, remember the words of Scott Adams... "The average person alive today will experience 80 complaint-free years of life. Unfortunately, they will live to be 160." Or something like that.
--
Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
Given that "they" have discovered the technique needed to reverse aging (http://resolution.colorado.edu/~nakamut/telomere/ telomere.html), I figure we'll have an anti-aging agent within 20 years or so. It may be prohibitively expensive for many years, but it'll be available. (grey market?)
--GAck
3. Profit!
2. ???
1. On Soviet Slashdot, a Beowulf cluster of alien Natalie Portman overlords welcomes YOU!
A good analog of the problem is the TechLine of the Laser. Hailed as the stepping stone to LightBasedCPU's [/:-)
--
First one Big as House--DeskTop--Hand--100/chip--"Now Optical Computers" nope.
--
The Feature Size of the Device, I/O and HouseKeeping are real Limits to any CPU.
And once you have all this extra stuff keeping it from jamming the very effect you are using is not easy.
Like CrystalMemory and others it works on paper only, Demo'ed as one shot, never seen again.
my2c
How difficult is it to do this setup?
Given that the experiments I've heard of are on the 2+2=4 level, how do we know that the difficulty of setting up a quantum computer to factor a specific 1024-bit number isn't comparable to the difficulty of doing the factoring by deterministic algorithms?
/.
/. If the government wants us to respect the law, it should set a better example.
This is a two-parter:
First, to Sangui5:
Sure, there won't be many of these built for a while, and sure, only governments might be able to afford them. But remember, it isn't just a few people with PGP that rely on RSA. Banks do. Government agencies do. Other governments do. I personally don't want some revolutionary nut in a third-world country stealing a quantum comp. and raiding my bank account. I'm funny that way.
To the Anonymous Coward who suggested quantum encryption:
Oh boy, there's some fun: first, you have to build your own communication medium, because phone lines and satellites are out. It has to be strong, it has to be extremely accurate, and it has to be completely isolated. Oh, and you'll need to make many different versions. And they all have to be hard-wired, as you can't do this sort of thing over radio waves. I'll explain why at the end. Second, you have to know what the error rates of the particles you're sending actually are. Counting photons is a tedious job. Third, you have to find someone else with the same setup you've got.
So you finally got your quantum encryption set up. Now what? Well, here's where it gets funny: quantum "encryption" is as effective if you are using 256-bit RSA encryption or if you are using the secret code from the ring you found in your Cracker Jack box. Why? Encryption is based on the concept that you don't want anyone to whom you don't give permission to see your data. All quantum encryption does is change the medium so that one of those pesky laws of quantum physics, Heisenberg's cute "uncertainty principle", keeps other people from looking at your stuff when it's in transmission without you knowing. You will know someone's watching because the error rates have risen. Oh, and to keep this medium working, it has to be as isolated from natural interference as possible. So, what happens when you know that someone's reading your stuff? You have to change channels, so to speak, and use a different connection, or wait until that eavesdropper gets off your communication line. Sounds annoying, doesn't it? Well, it is, as well as financially unfeasible for, say, an entire country.
So, which is worse, the problem or the solution?
Mike
Anybody else out there interpret the description of NEC's device to be structurally kinda like an ultra-miniature triode electron tube?
The reservoir electrode == the (cold) cathode.
The pulse-gate electrode == the grid.
The prove electrode == the anode (plate).
Since the electrons are contained within an enclosure (the Cooper-pair box), this makes the device more structurally like a tube than a field-effect transistor, which is purely solid-state.
However, the operational results of this device is defintely many worlds apart from our old voltage amplifying friend from yesteryear.
Wierd, eh?
Assuming that you have a constant number of processors in your "parallel machine" searching through an n-element list still takes linear (IOW, O(n)) time. This is pretty obvious to see since your uniprocessor machine can emulate a k-processor box where each virtual processor runs at 1/k (minus context switching overhead) the speed of the original processor.
Also, you don't need a special computational model to search through a 4-element list in O(1). In fact, I have an ultra-secret algorithm for searching through a 5 bazillion-element list in O(1) on a Turing machine!!! (hint -- if the size of your input is constant and the function is computable, you'll always be able to compute the answer in a constant amount of time).
-NooM
I find it fascinating that /. readers are so often scientific illiterate in so many fields, including computing. (Yes, this is a flame directed at almost everyone; moderate away...)
In this case, I refer to the belief that 'all computing is equal', that the only difference between, say, a QC, a Compaq and my brain is in the implementation and speed. QC's are not just really fast, expensive and fragile supercomputers, they won't run Quake or Linux, and they won't replace those anyones Compaq. They do a few things really well--sorts, searches, etc--but most things very poorly, if at all. They are less general purpose machines than accessories, designed to fulfill some specific needs--coprocessors for your Cray, rather then replacements. On top of that, they cost a fortune and are unimaginably fragile compared to a desktop machine.
In some fields they will be revolutionary, but for the most part the effects will be similar to the release of the K7 on the population of Iran.
No, you misunderstood your CompSci classes.
All computing machines are not equal - a turing machine and a cray are equivalent, but a QC is NOT a turing machine (and probably your brain too)
Turing actually envisaged a class of computers more powerful than a 'Turing machine' - QCs qualify.
Given how much computational power is stuffed into the three pounds or so of grey matter I have in my head, a figure I expect to be quite large as I wouldn't be surprised at all if my (or anyone else's) brain had more power than every computer on the planet combined, I expect that the brain *already* does QC on quite a large scale.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
I did some reasearch on this for my degree a couple of years ago. I got most of my info from the los-alamos pre-print archive under quant-ph.
http://xxx.lanl.gov/archive/quant-ph
Some useful background information is in Andrew Steane's paper, but you will get heaps more stuff with a quick search.
Remember this site: http://xxx.lanl.gov it's damn useful.
The Beowulf cluster messages are tongue-in-cheek posts poking fun at our community. Lighten up and smile once in a while.
Can anyone point me to a decide 'for dummies' quide to QP on the Web? This stuff fascinates me, but I have only a rudimentary background in Physics, so I'd like to see the whole thing explained in 'layman's terms' (in as much as it is possible to explain it at all!!)
From what I understand about the NSA, "National Security" is paramount. Most of what I know is from reading "The Puzzle Palace", and he pretty much posits that NSA is *ALWAYS* a minimum 15 yrs ahead on tech, and usually 2 to 3 levels of tech above anything that we see. Assuming that, the fact that this is in the private sector leads me to believe that they're (NSA) on to bigger and better things. What that might be, I have no idea. Probably something odd discovered in the search for M/string-theory.
The CMPNet article scares me because they are talking practicality. Not 20 years off. Real world, many-bit devices. And NEC, the one with the solid state research, is a multinational corporation. Lucent, I hear is also in the game -- nearing practical results. I can't remember my source on the Lucent stuff, so take it with a grain of salt.
ratatatat
Nice sci-fi by Greg Bear, has Quantum Logic AI's and stuff... Have you read it ?
There is a school of thought that says conciousness has its roots in quantum "weirdness".
Posted by Faithless the Wonder Boy:
If we were to make games completely real, they'd lose a lot of the fun. For instance, the rocket jump would simply send bits of player flying all over the arena. A one-hour deathmatch would result in all the players getting exhausted, and a couple of them dying from heart attacks. Also, control mechanisms would have to become much more advanced, giving you control of breathing, more exact control of limbs, etc. Such a system might be good for a simulation game such as 'Hidden and Dangerous', but it would lack the immediacy of Quake.
--------------------------------------
You miss my point - QC might *not* do this any better than standard computers.
And if the attacker has access to the physical channel (which he must to get the info) and he has a quantum computer then he could almost certainly just intercept the entire signal and reproduce it, so he gets the info he wants and the reciever has no idea it was intercepted. The error rates would be lower due to the decreased distance from signal source to reciever and therefore the reciever might find out, but this could easily be overcome by purposely introducing error into the signal he sends as he sends it.
>...but they're worthless for transmitting
information so in practice relativity still works.
This is exactly what may not be true if Bohm's theory accurately accounts for quantum phenomena..
At least, that's what I think David Z. Albert was saying in class...
Well, nanocomputers would be a totally different animal. If you had a 10,000 MHZ supercomputer in each of the cells in your body, then you'd have a combined total of 10e18 or so MHZ. Thats just one person. Lets say you had a highly dense lump of material that had a few thousand quadrillion processors lumped together (the size of a watermelon maybe?) connected to a petabyte of ram (maybe the size of a bowling ball)..... see the potential of nanotech? Still quashes quantum computing.. Though QC is still very very interesting and will change some things drastically.. like factoring and encryption. The two types of computing are fundamentally different though.
Yep, this extraordinary new technological possibility does not thrill me, it scares me. Not because I think of nefarious uses, but because I know that I don't have the desire to go back and really learn to use Hamiltonians that I haven't seen since Advanced Engineering Math. I also don't want to brush up on the quantum physics that I never truly understood to begin with.
There was a day (year/decade), when the idea of learning new things and facing new challenges thrilled me. Now I'm just glad that I have saved enough money to retire comfortably.
I'm old and I haven't even turned forty yet. I can't scoff at all those old used-up professors any more; I am one.
Well just looking at another view of this, talking about the bone breaking and blood loss ect. One could gather that this could use quite well in the medical research feild. Treating of bullet wounds or even if you look at in a diffrent way, you could also do crime scene reserch. The possibility are basically endless. Seti project could be done in what? A minute, an hour or a day. That would be very impressive. I wonder if this would hurt the cpu wars, becuase calculating that fast, I don't think you would need anything faster for games and business apps.
I ate my tag line.
I ate my tag line.
-=Ellis (D)25=-
um, sounds quite a bit like real life, eh? Hopefully someone can steer me in the right direction here, but it seems to me when we can figure out how to do large scale quantum computing we'll be basically able to do anything. Aren't the "Universe as we know it" and that pen on your desk just part of a big (very) quantum computer? Aren't we?
I think the final straw is Heisenberg's theory, it'll be tough to get around that one. And, of course, the fact that time keeps going.
(is this what happens when geeks go meta-physical?)
+&x
Wasn't that also true of normal electronic computers for many years? Eventually, they ended up on everybody's desk.
Just give it time.
"Be nice, veer left, and never stop thinking" Iain Banks - Walking On Glass
There's no such thing as a degree Kelvin. And by the time it becomes practical, Quake will be long forgotten by most.
Ahhhh, super-fluid helium! All of those days studying frictionless surfaces in physics won't come to waste if I ever get my hands on some SF helium.
Imagine having a play toy at tempuratures under 7K. Or in the case of the article 1K!
Unfortunately with the fact being that one needs temperatures that low in order to have the right conditions for quantum computing means that we probably won't see a consumer version in our life time.
The amount of really cool stuff that can be done at temperatures 1K and lower is amazing. Eistein-Bose condensates, which lead to matter beams, which lead to true 3D holograms like what we have seen in so many movies. Quantum computing. Tests with frictionless surfaces. Ahh. That is why I'm a physics major.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
"Thus far, no quantum computer using a solid-state..."
Not gonna Happen Folks. QC is dead end.
Basic Problem is the cross talk issue in packing.
They have solve that one first.
my2c
There is a big difference between exploration and conquest. Remember that technology is amoral, it is the applications/outcomes which are determined by our positive or negative tendencies, and even that is defined to some extend by social context. The psychology of "crackers" (essentially ego driven) is completely different from the pure form of hacking (curiosity driven), about the same difference between a vandal and an artist. Both might use similar techniques but the creative tendencies of an artist are channeled into positive outcomes.
Researchers are a different breed from paranoid security cryptoanalysis (at least I hope so as my taxes are being levied for them to be paranoid). Science and research operate in a climate of open and free exchange of ideas and anything which is regarded as a "difficult challenge" is of interest. Security on the other hand is dealing with control and exclusion (private property) which tends to bring out the acquisitive side of human nature (remember wanting a toy just so that your sibling can't have it?). The impulses that drive research and finding knowledge (and to some extent pure hacking) are not the same as cracking and destorying data.
I just always find it interesting when human nature morally cris-crosses itself....
Society has developed informal rules (social norms) and institutions (courts, non-profits) to minimise human nature to destroy itself. Morality is a rather complex abstraction in its own right. As one wit once noted on the dispartity of income distribution along the age axis
"If you're not a communist when you're young, you've no heart. If you're not a capitalist when you're old, you've no brain"
Good, bad, indifferent, we are all evolving bitstreams in the global memory of human conciousness. I only hope that people have enough self-awareness of their own nature and act accordingly.
LL
If quantum computers are turning complete, then they will be able to do all the same things current computers do, including rendering scenes.
First, we do not believe that quantum computers could solve NP problems (QP != NP in CS speak). If I remember correctly QP is strictly contained in #P (really P^#P). This means that a public key cryptosystem based on NP complete problems instead of factoring numbers could be secure against a quantum computer.. except that many many cases of an NP complete problem are easy to solve.. but if we can't use factoring numbers because of the preasence of quantum computers then this might be an acceptable alternative.. it could mean you would need to upgrade you're key (and software to generate keys) frequently to keep up with advances in mathematics and CS.
I geus a cheezy way to describe the limitations of cuantum computing is to say that you get a lot of really powerfull parallelism, but since you only read out one answer you can not directly take advantage of it. The quantum algorithms ``make the wrong answers cancel out.'' Currently all the quantum mechanical algorithms which provide exponential speedup (like factoring) work by finding the period of some function by useing a Foruer transform.
The Christian religion has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world. -- Bertrand Russell
there will be a market for only about five quantum computers.
It may well be that Quantum Computing will open up new ways of encrypting, but I can't see them. Everything I know encryption leaves me to believe that we are wide open. What little that I understand about the quantum microverse and quantum computing, leads me to think that anything quantum can *do*, it can *undo*. Although you may be able to encrypt huge keys, quantum allows you to try ALL the combinations on the lock at once, no matter how large. I know that practicality means you have to carve the key up so that you can go at it with the number of bit's you have at your disposal, but I don't see that as much of a barrier.
ratatatat
Can't wait for Back Orifice 1 Kelvin!
I just bought a new video card, will I be able to use it with a quantum computer? (It's AGP)
One more question, how far can you overclock these babies?
No.
No, No, No.
NP-complete problems are hard.
All of them.
Equally hard.
That is, if you can solve one NP-complete problem, you can use it to do the others in polynomial type. A Hamiltonian oracle can solve 3-coloring, circuit-sat, traveling salesmen, and the others, fast
...
I don't really know if quantum computers can solve NP problems, or even factoring for that matter, since I don't know how to phrase algos in quantum computable terms....although, like parallel algorithms, it'll be a booming area of research, you can bet.
we only use about %10 of our brain though. a computer running a good os can utilize allot more of what it's got.
and the os can always be updated with greater ease. i guess the problem is that most people never need more that %10.
imagine using a chip in your brain to focus cerebral development to the field of your choice.
then again, having a powerful unit for processing hooked up to your motherboard (brain) means little if you can interact with it
at great speeds.
once again we're limited by our inferior architecture.
I am a physics student at the university of cobenhagen, an for the past year I have had an exelent teacher named Andrew jackson. He has written some notes for his quantum physics curse, they are ment to supplement a book, but can be read without it. They are however pretty advanced stuff, but they give a good description of the math behind quantum physics, and if you skip the advanced stuff (witch is about 90%), then they should be able to make sence (especially chapter II).
The notes can be downloaded at:
http://alf.nbi.dk/~jackson/
(The top hyperlink) and are in two parts:
chapters 1 to 8 and
chapters 9 to 10
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
Rendering aside, this type of computer could consider more variables in a game than anything that is currently available. Back to the FPS game.
Let's just list a few factors which would influence the outcome of a match.
Height
Physical Condition
Heart Rate
Rate of Respiration
Lung Capacity
Age and related degeration of bodily systems
Type of footwear
Striations of the barrel of a firearm
Irregularities in the surface of a bullet
Wind Resistance
Crosswind
Temperature
If clothing fibers would clog a hollow point to such a degree that it won't expand
Finger Length
How a weapon performs as it heats up and the moving parts wear
Even if rendering routines for quantum computers are never written, it is the underlying computations that make the sim important, calculating voluminous numbers of possibilities is where the strength of quantum computing lies.
For example, quantum computers could determine exactly what is a perfect game of chess.
Rendering is the easy part, that can be handled by hardware that is only a few years away on our current path.
LK
Actually, the consensus among complexity theorists is that quantum turing machines are more powerful, even theoretically, than regular probabilistic turing machines. This has not been proven, for similar reasons that ~(P=NP) has not been proven either (namely, that it is freakin HARD problem to do so).
For more on this, look at this paper by Umesh Vazirani (one of the big names in computational complexity): Quantum Complexity Theory.
>This is getting quite repetitive.
'Twas meant to be a joke -- the "OW!" was meant to be my response to someone smacking me upside the head for saying this...
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Now that the theoretical is no longer so difficult to achieve physically, maybe we can focus more on the practical uses of QC. Check out openqubit.org, they are currently working on QC models, ways to implement Shor's algorithm, and other interesting things.
Sounds great! Does anyone else see the death of e-commerce in this?! I never did care much that the NSA probably had this stuff long ago, since I'm not a national security risk (at least I don't think I am). But large corporations having this stuff bothers me. Nothing was secure from the NSA (if you thought RSA wasn't crackable by them...dream on), but having nothing secure from corporations is a whole other problem.
And wait until some hacker cracks into Lucent's Quantum Computing Array, and breaks into your bank account.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
This presents excellent possibilities. Imagine a distributed.net client, or a game executed on such a machine.
The realism or flight sims and FPS games would be mind boggling. A machine like this would be able to calculate whether a bullet would glance off of a rib and break it or if it would punch straight through. How much blood would be lost, and friction could be calculated to determine how much one would slip on the blood.
This is very cool.
LK
Create a system for exchanging keys through which the observation of the key by an eavesdropper fundamentally changes the key (due to Heisenberg), and you can create secure systems.
Reading this article, I can't help but thinking of Konrad Zuse working in his parents apartment, building a -mechanical- memory system for his computers back in the 30s. Yikes. Sure, it was a binary system, but it was a far cry from modern computers.
Quantum computing is at much the same stage right now. Some brainy-folk have shown that the math works, and it should be possible to build these things, but now we need to invent ways of making it practical.
The only thing that worries me is that I'm going to need to learn how this stuff works some day if I want to keep a job in the industry!
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Great. We will shortly (20 yrs?) have quantum computers. But is this a good thing.
Yeah, it would be great for all sorts of things (just imagine the speed boost for things like ray-tracing, searching, and sorting) but it would also make a brute force attack on any encryption algorithm a simple matter, rather than a computational nightmare.
Now, it would be fair if everybody had their nondeterministic turing machines to chug out quantum encryption, but how much is this going to cost. I'm thinking that quantum computing, and all of it's benefits, will be the realm of governments and large corperations, at the expense of everybody else.
It is only when I read stories like this that I feel sad that one day I must die. In 100 years, people will be doing SUCH cool things with these technologies that I'd LOVE to be able to see.
"Thus, in contrast to a conventional computer, quantum registers can perform single operations on combinatorial sets of data, making them far more powerful."
This sounds pretty rad. I used to read all kinds of stuff about quantum physics, and Niels Bohr is one of my heros, I'm glad stuff like this is finding some real practical applications.
-Ben
bensmith@biz1.net
Can anyone try and explain this a little more clearly? I took a half a semester or so of quantum mechanics in college, so I'm familiar with superpositioning of quantum states, Schroedinger, and such, but I'm still confused as to how that can be used to allow for operations to be performed on combinatorial sets of data... I'm looking for an answer more from a computer science standpoint rather than a physics one, if it's possible...
Dave
You might note that you posted to the wrong article... but as a side issue:
With quantum computing does that mean we could only view the contents of a Micros~1 Word document or modify them but not both?
This space for sale
Information still can't be transmitted faster
than the speed of light. Quantum entanglement
effects (such as a pair of photons having
instantaneous effects on each other irregardless
of distance) can seem to violate the speed of
light, but they're worthless for transmitting
information so in practice relativity still works.
Quantum entanglement can be used to provide
quantum cryptography over networks - unbreakable
codes, even with a quantum computer.
Of course there's such a thing as a degree Kelvin. It's equal to degrees Celsius, only measured from the hypothetical absolute zero instead of the freezing point of water at standard pressure.
Still, you were probably thinking of something specific when you said the above. What was it?
gomi
incomplete statements cause such trouble
Heh; We'll be 70 and we'll have to get the young whippersnappers to teach us how to use the quantum computers :)
Seriously, it will be interesting to see if the first generation to grow up on quantum computing grasps it quickly, while the old fogeys (us) wallow around with our old-school computing mindset, and to compare this to our generation(s) computer lifestyle and how we roll our eyes at the grandparents who are stuck in the mechanical age.
I love my major. Gives me the practical education of an engineer with all the scientific background of a physics major.
:)
As for practical applications, look at Eistein-Bose condensates and matter lasers.
Disclamer - Opinion of Person
This stuff can probably used in neural net research. From what I've seen at my school, back-propogation is very slow even on fast serial computers. These quantum computers could speed up the process by running all back propogation calcs in parallel. yes/no?
Yeah, but they're pretty clearly just (well, if you're thinking of who I'm thinking of...um, well, Penrose et al.) intellectually jacking off. There's really nothing going for the idea except the gee-whizzyness of it.
With quantum computing does that mean we could only view the contents of a Micros~1 Word document or modify them but not both?
No. It means that you can not view it without changing it. ;)
I read an artical a few years ago in the quant_physics archives http://xxx.lanl.gov/ about using quantum states to encrypt data communications.
Somebody (one of the telco companies) had demonstrated a configuration where they were using it over about 50km of standard optic fibre.
The idea went along the lines of using a some quantum state to transmit data. Because the other end also knew this state they could test for bits in this state. Probably some sort of polarising filters.
Somebody eaves dropping wouldn't know which space to measure in so would only be able to get a little information out. Since they are doing measurements on the fiber they are destroying the information on the way through so that the receiver would know what was happening and could stop the transmittion before secret information was lost. Long before the snooper had time to do any sort of traffic analysis and learn what code was being used. I guess classical encryption on top of this (giving a statisticaly random bit pattern) would make any analysis impossible.
Most of the discussion was about codes needed to detect intruders while still being able to correct random noise that is common on the quantum scale of things.
Posted by Lord Kano-The Gangster Of Love:
>>Well.. this seems to be a first...
>>A moron who puts his name behind his work.
Yes, Zack you certainly are an innovator.
LK
I'm not sure about that. The current applications that are being proposed for QC are of a fundamentally different nature. QC speeds up things like searches, but I can't see a way for it to easily speed up things like rendering or kinetics simulations. At the very least, a very different approach to those problems would have to be thought of.
Does anyone else have more information on what kinds of problems quantum computing will and will _not_ be good at?
I was thinking about rendering though... couldn't you run a render farm from a chip? 3D graphics could improve a million fold pretty easily if this were the case. Of course, first someone has to write the software.
the technical details described in the article, but I do have (imho ;) a decent understanding of the computational principle behind quantum computing. I've seen some pretty wrong (or just confused) things in the comments...and /. discussions of encryption/complexity related issues frequently get mired in BS ;)
Quantum computers do not really translate to higher FPS in Quake3 or more realistic flightsims. You don't get quantum computers that have amazing SPECfp numbers.
Quantum computers do operations that normally take one order of magnitude in a much lower order time. Example: searching a list of items for a value on von Neumann machine is O(n) (length of the list), since you have to look at each element till you find the one you want. You can do this in O(1) on a parallel machine. This is a significant improvement. IIRC there was a quantum computer that could search a 4-element list in O(1).
Obviously, that's a pretty trivial problem. Even for very long lists, O(n) isn't bad, and you can do it in parallel.
What about fundamentally much more complex problems, such as factoring, or better, something NP-complete such as circuit-sat or Hamilton paths (that's what the article was talking about, I think. Those guys think their quantum computer is a Hamilton oracle, if I'm right. So you have to pose questions in the form of graphs...not a serious problem since all NP is orthogonal). A parallel machine doesn't help there. But a quantum computer can take NP problems from exponential to polynomial time.
All of a sudden factoring (not NP, just decently hard) goes from taking 100 trillion years to taking hours.
Yes, all encryption that uses factoring as a trapdoor (one-way function) would be toast.
No, it wouldn't necessarily be any better at running first person shooters.
Still, an NP oracle machine IMHO would be much more significant than some bloody nanotech robots.
So, when does Sun put Java on this thing? When does Microsoft announce "Visual Q"? And, of course, you'll need a larger quantum computer to run that one, and it won't be compatible with other quantum programming languages. But an animated quark will pop up from time to time and advise you on your programming style.
I read an article in Sci-Am about this quantum superposition stuff. And I still don't understand how I would go about using it for computation. I feel like such a caveman.
No one has suggested how awesome a Beowulf cluster of these would be...OW!
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Yeah, game realism would be incredible. But imagine what we could do if QC-ing was integrated into our brain! We'd be god like, in that processing information would go far beyond our current (pathetic) rate.
EVERYTHING would change, new challenges and new goals would replace the old ones.
Forget game realism, the focus would shift to mathematical computing for fun.
"Perfection is achieved only at the point of collapse."
This is completely theoretical, and I am using approximates for several figures -- but you'll get the general idea.
Say a "supercomputer" (from the article) is equivalent to a 10,000 MHz machine. This would make our neat new "chip" the equivalent of a 8.76e15 MHz processor. Wow.
Going to distributed.net and looking up the current stats for the RC5-64 project (http://tally.distributed.net/rc5-64/), I saw that it had done 27,504,975 blocks yesterday with 41,655 machines contributing. Let's say, on average, 30,000 machines contributed for the full 24 hours (some people may turn theirs off, etc.). Let's also say that the average computer is the equivalent to a 300 MHz machine, which gives us a combined 9,000,000 Mhz per day.
At 27,504,975 blocks per day, it would take approximately 2,499 days to go though all of the blocks. However, if we substituted our 8.76 quadrillion MHz processor in, we could do 2.677e16 blocks per day. Not too shabby. At that rate, we could have done all of the RC5-64 blocks in 2.57e-6 days, which is 0.22 seconds.
I had a physics teacher in high school who insisted that it was called -273.15 degrees Celsius but zero Kelvin (i.e., no "degree").
I had some physics courses too at university, but I don't remember what they called it there.
--- Premature complacency is the evil of all roots
Posted by ebenjamin:
Using embeded Quantum Computers to control your nanomachines is it!!!!
http://www.starbridgesystems.com/home/mainpage.htm
a few months ago, there was a posting about systems from this company, which was supposed to change the landscape of computing. So far Icaveo search engine is the only vendor who has bought this system (but the site is not built yet). Slashdot was critical about it back then. Let us see
One researcher is running at less than 1 degree kelvin and the other is running in a vacuum chamber filled with liquid helium. In other words, neither of these things is going to be sitting on your desk any time soon (Maybe never.) Yes it's a start but it's a little early to be talking about FPS in Quake. By the time these systems are usable by us mere mortals, Quake will probably be totally immersive.
The inception of full-on Quantum Computers will no doubt be a major milestone in the tech age. The benefits are countless. However, will Quantum Computers mark a pinnacle? What's next? What could be faster?
Certainly, with this technology, we are nearing the threshold of "smaller, better, faster", no?
Hermm...
-Cereb
any more info on icaveo??? went to the site and checked it out; whats up with it? they claim they are using starbridge + proprietary algorithms to search code, video, audio, text..
-- your knees hurt, don't they?
When will we start to hear about Quantum Networking?
I'm no expert on QM, and I believe that this particular aspect of the subject is controversial, but as I understand it, a plausible interpretation of Bohm's theory allows for the possibility of transmitting a readable signal to any point in the universe, instantly. That would sure beat the hell out of Gbit ethernet, and even that terabit line Siemens is working with... basically, anything that operated with light or electricity would be toast..
Open fire if you think this is way off base... given how much I know, you're probably right.
Anyway, just a random thought..
Unfortunately openqubit.org is nothing but a "coming soon" sign. :( While we're waiting for that to open up we can go to www.qubit.org, particularily the "Introductions & Tutorials" page.