The Cellar - Quantum Computers

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Quantum Computers

Amazing how Anna Nicole gets so much coverage when a real news event goes almost totally unreported. From The Economist of 17 Feb 2007:

Quote:

Quantum computing
Orion's belter
The world's first practical quantum computer is unveiled

... For, on February 13th, D-Wave Systems, a firm based in Burnaby, near Vancouver, announced the existence of the world's first practical quantum computer.

On paper at least, quantum computers promise to reduce dramatically the time needed to solve a range of mathematical tasks known as NP-complete problems. One famous example is the travelling salesman problem ... a puzzle that increases exponentially in complexity with the number of cities considered. ...

Quantum computers ... encoding all possible permutations in the form of a small number of "qubits". ... By a process known as entanglement, two qubits can encode four different values simultaneously (00, 01, 10 and 11). Four qubits can represent 16 values, and so on. That means huge calculations can be done using a manageable number ...

D-Wave Systems chose two very practical problems to demonstrate its 16-qubit processor, which it has called Orion. One was a pattern-matching application for searching through a database of molecules ... The other was a scheduling application for assigning people to seats, subject to certain constraints. Airlines might be interested in that one. ...

God told Bill Cosby to build the ark, X qubits by Y qubits. So this computer means they don't have to convert into a metric/English decimal before doing calculations?:D

Since this is the first practical Quantum, It's a hardware breakthrough rather than software puzzle, or is it both?

I guess this would enable a gun-camera to compare a face to a huge database, before the face's carrier(body), got out of range.

IIRC, this could trash PGP?

I hope they name it the Feynman 2000, just for fun.

I'll all for this new technology

I know there was another thread where that was discussed.

But people understand ANS and looking down on ANS makes them feel better about themselves. Nobody understands quantum computing so all it does is make people feel dumb and that yet another technology they don't understand will either be used against them, confuse them or lead to a feeling that they can expect to have even less control over their own lives.

That's why ANS gets more headlines than quantum computing.