Linkstrikesback
Member
This may be one case where its too dangerous to let the wider public get their hands on them.
Lol.
Oh my god this thread.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/the-talk-3
This may be one case where its too dangerous to let the wider public get their hands on them.
QBox 1.5
A universe where Microsoft is cool? Sounds optimistic.Sure to be a success in at least some of all possible universes.
I was about to post this, it was a great read for me a while ago.
There are several tasks for which a quantum computer will be useful. The one that is mentioned most frequently is that quantum computers will be able to read secret messages communicated over the internet using the current technologies (such as RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and other cryptographic protocols that are based on the hardness of number-theoretic problems like factoring and discrete logarithm). But there are many other fascinating applications.
First of all, if we have a quantum computer, it will be useful for scientists for conducting virtual experiments. Quantum computing started with Feynmans observation that quantum systems are hard to model on a conventional computer. If we had a quantum computer, we could use it to model quantum systems. (This is known as quantum simulation.) For example, we could model the behavior of atoms and particles at unusual conditions (for example, very high energies that can be only created in the Large Hadron Collider) without actually creating those unusual conditions. Or we could model chemical reactionsbecause interactions among atoms in a chemical reaction is a quantum process.
Another use of quantum computers is searching huge amounts of data. Lets say that we have a large phone book, ordered alphabetically by individual names (and not by phone numbers). If we wanted to find the person who has the phone number 6097348000, we would have to go through the whole phone book and look at every entry. For a phone book with one million phone numbers, it could take one million steps. In 1996, Lov Grover from Bell Labs discovered that a quantum computer would be able to do the same task with one thousand steps instead of one million.
More generally, quantum computers would be useful whenever we have to find something in a large amount of data: a needle in a haystackwhether this is the right phone number or something completely different.
Another example of that is if we want to find two equal numbers in a large amount of data. Again, if we have one million numbers, a classical computer might have to look at all of them and take one million steps. We discovered that a quantum computer could do it in a substantially smaller amount of time.
Sony will beat them to the market and come out cheaper at that with the PSQ!
I know the research and commercial-scale benefits of quantum computing are vast, but, when would we see a reasonably-priced PQC (personal quantum computer)? 2030? 2040?
EDIT: I should add that my question above assumes 2017 is the year we see functioning engineering, not just research-based stuff.
The better question would be: what the hell would you want to do with a personal quatum computer?
They work on a very different logic than current computers, and are theoretically only better at very specific thing normal people shouldn't have any interest in. It won't run Windows or your Internet browser faster.
.Let the hacking wars begin.
The better question would be: what the hell would you want to do with a personal quatum computer?
They work on a very different logic than current computers, and are theoretically only better at very specific thing normal people shouldn't have any interest in. It won't run Windows or your Internet browser faster.
I'm ready for the quantum revolution. I for one welcome our future AI overlords.
Post of the thread right here. *therockclap.gif*Missionary Superposition
I thought -- it was going to change the way we do binary. I mistakenly said fractions between 0 and 1, but it seems to be more to it than that -- "qubits" -- having something to do with the state of 0 and 1.
I'm stopping from contributing now, as I'm sure someone on GAF knows how to explain it.
Google is working on a quantum machine, they had a doc on Youtube. thats where I'm getting my information from. Its about the size of a room currently.. They seemed to sell it on speed of calculations that would take X time... would take Y time with quantum processing.
Definitely earlier. The moment this becomes production-ready, Google, Amazon and Microsoft will rush to get them for their cloud-based projects (whatever the f they are at that moment). Which means production R&D will be eaten up by these giants mostly, and from that point, it will be about figuring out how to actually use them in any clientside program in a way that warrants that increased pricetag.
Apple Q for $3000 in your hand, in 2022? You bet.
In the future we may have to take into account neural processing units and quantum processing units besides CPUs, GPUs, etc for our PCs.
If those bring us better videogame AI I welcome them.
The difference is that a classical bit can have exactly 2 values - 0 and 1, whereas a qbit can contain any superposition of those two states. Common examples of qbits are things like particles with spin or polarised light. This all goes back to the basic premise of the wavefunction of a system being the superposition of all its possible states, with the function collapsing into one of its substates when you interact with the system.
You'll be able to orgasm without physical stimulation.
Quantum "computers" for now use superconductivity afaik. I think you won't see liquid helium tanks at home for videogames.
Thanks Linkyn,
Question time:
1. When you say superposition, is that a range of values between 0 and 1. Is a 'fraction' in between a good way of thinking of it? Or are you saying that 0 and 1 can have multiple values, rather than our current two definite 0 or 1 values.
2. How would a quantum machine be utilized in a calculative capacity, that would be superior to today's traditional machines.
But will it run Crysis?
Thanks Linkyn,
Question time:
1. When you say superposition, is that a range of values between 0 and 1. Is a 'fraction' in between a good way of thinking of it? Or are you saying that 0 and 1 can have multiple values, rather than our current two definite 0 or 1 values.
2. How would a quantum machine be utilized in a calculative capacity, that would be superior to today's traditional machines?
I'll LogOff and take my answer offline.
Thank you.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/22/age-of-quantum-computing-d-waveBack in 1971 the first Intel processor was made up of 2,300 transistors. Intel now produce microprocessors with more than 5bn transistors. However, theyre still limited by their simple binary options. With quantum computers the bits, or qubits as they are known, afford far more options owing to the uncertainty of their physical state.
In the mysterious subatomic realm of quantum physics, particles can act like waves, so that they can be particle or wave or particle and wave. This is whats known in quantum mechanics as superposition. As a result of superposition a qubit can be a 0 or 1 or 0 and 1. That means it can perform two equations at the same time. Two qubits can perform four equations. And three qubits can perform eight, and so on in an exponential expansion. That leads to some inconceivably large numbers, not to mention some mind-boggling working concepts.
In a neat, spacious lab in Burnaby, a satellite of Vancouver, Im looking inside what appears to be a large black fridge about 10 feet high. Within it is an elaborate structure of circuit boards, not unlike the sort of thing a physics class might construct out of Meccano, except with beautifully colourful niobium wafers as the centrepiece. It all looks fairly unremarkable, yet somewhere in here a multiplicity of different universes are thought to exist.
The lab belongs to a small company called D-Wave, a highly skilled collection of just 140 employees that prides itself on building the worlds first functioning quantum computer, which is what is contained within the large fridge-like casing. Actually it is a fridge, the coldest fridge ever assembled. The cooling apparatus enables the niobium computer chip at its core to function at a temperature of just under 273C, or as close to absolute zero as the known universe gets.
The supercooled environment is necessary to maintain coherent quantum activity of superposition and entanglement, the state in which particles begin to interact again rather mysteriously co-dependently, and the qubits are linked by quantum mechanics regardless of their position in space. Any intrusion of heat or light would corrupt the process and thus the effectiveness of the computer.
Exactly how and why quantum physics adheres to these science-fiction like rules remains an issue of great speculation, but perhaps the most common theory is that the different quantum states exist in separate universes. The D-Wave quantum computer I look at has one thousand qubits.
A thousand qubit computer can be in 2 to the 1,000 states at one time, which is 10 to the 300th power, says D-Waves CEO, Vern Brownell. Theres only 10 to the 80th atoms in the universe. Now does this mean its in 10 to the 300th universes at the same time?
Can billions of different universes coexist within one computer?
hopefully for rendering/lighting solutions. Particle simulations... Cloth simulations... things like that.
Hi everyone, uninformed plebeian here.
I know people are joking about Crysis, but what does this actually for consumer stuff like gaming? Smartphones? Computers? Or is it as simple as the same stuff, but just really, really fast?
RE: Quantum computers breaking encryption. While it's true that they can break lots of algorithms, there do exist a number of classical algorithms which appear to be quantum secure. Lattice-based cryptography for example.
Overall, the singular most valuable thing a quantum computer can do right now is serve as a perfect quantum simulator (ie it can efficiently simulate any quantum system). Quantum computers will likely never be more useful than classical computers outside of certain specific instances imo, for a generic problem quantum computers only offer a quadratic speedup (O(N) -> O(sqrt(N))). Given how difficult it is to create coherence between qubits I am sceptical there will exist a time in which a quadratic speedup is worth all the trouble.
Missionary Superposition
RE: Quantum computers breaking encryption. While it's true that they can break lots of algorithms, there do exist a number of classical algorithms which appear to be quantum secure. Lattice-based cryptography for example.
Computational sciences have become a massive industry and dominate sectors such as aerospace, mechanical and finance engineering. Could quantum computers not provide a significant leap in available power for these fields?
Computational sciences have become a massive industry and dominate sectors such as aerospace, mechanical and finance engineering. Could quantum computers not provide a significant leap in available power for these fields?
...<snip>...
Annealing is made possible by an effect in physics known as quantum tunnelling, which can endow each qubit with an awareness of every other one.
"The gate model... is the single worst thing that ever happened to quantum computing", Geordie Rose, chief technology officer for D-Wave, told BBC Radio 4's Material World programme.
"And when we look back 20 years from now, at the history of this field, we'll wonder why anyone ever thought that was a good idea."
Dr Rose's approach entails a completely different way of posing your question, and it only works for certain questions.
But according to a paper presented this week (the result of benchmarking tests required by Nasa and Google), it is very fast indeed at finding the optimal solution to a problem that potentially has many different combinations of answers.
In one case it took less than half a second to do something that took conventional software 30 minutes.
A classic example of one of these "combinatorial optimisation" problems is that of the travelling sales rep, who needs to visit several cities in one day, and wants to know the shortest path that connects them all together in order to minimise their mileage.
The D-Wave Two chip can compare all the possible itineraries at once, rather than having to work through each in turn.
Reportedly costing up to $15m, housed in a garden shed-sized box that cools the chip to near absolute zero, it should be installed at Nasa and available for research by autumn 2013.
US giant Lockheed Martin earlier this year upgraded its own D-Wave machine to the 512 qubit D-Wave Two.
The difference is that a classical bit can have exactly 2 values - 0 and 1, whereas a qbit can contain any superposition of those two states. Common examples of qbits are things like particles with spin or polarised light. This all goes back to the basic premise of the wavefunction of a system being the superposition of all its possible states, with the function collapsing into one of its substates when you interact with the system.
One interesting thing about quantum computation is that factorisation problems, which are at the heart of encryption methods like Diffie-Hellman, are easily solvable (eg by using Shor's algorithm), so many classical encryption methods become effectively worthless once quantum computation is available.
1. It's not range, it basically means you can have a state of 1, a state of 0 or 1+0 at the same time.
2. There's some pretty interesting possibilities for specialised quantum algorithms, which exploit the behaviours of the hardware and enable you to reduce incredibly large, problem sets down to a solution super quickly. E.g. if a traditional algorithm wanted to figure out the optimal play in a game of chess, it could sequentially work through every permutation of every possible move and take an non-trivial amount of time (or non-trivial amount of computing resources) to process that information. Even a humble quantum computer with a dozen or so qubits, could basically calculate every possible permutation of every possible move all at the same time and provide you with an answer within fractions of a second.
1. In quantum theory, superposition refers to the idea that any linear combination of two valid states gives another valid state. What that means is that, since both 0 and 1 are valid states for a qbit, any linear combination of the two is also a valid state that the qbit can be in. You can think of it as having all of one, or all of the other, or a bit of both. The only basic restriction is that if the superposed state contains more of one state, it contains less of the other, so that the total probability of being in any one state is never more than unity (I'm sorry if this all sounds a bit technical). In essence, though, it means that the qbit can potentially be in any of an infinity of possible superposed states.
One big difficulty arises here because of readout. Even if a quantum system can exist in a superposition of its possible 'eigenstates' (1 and 0 in this case), whenever you interact with it, it collapses back into one of them. The nature of the superposed state determines how likely each outcome is, but a priori, it's impossible to predict with certainty which one it'll be (unless the system was already in one of its eigenstates). In practice, this means that whenever you read the value of the qbit, you risk losing information, so quantum computing systems and algorithms need to be created with that in mind.
2. Obvious advantages in computation are in problems that can be very iteration-heavy, like factorisation for instance. To me, the more interesting application lies in quantum key distribution, which uses entanglement to create and share private encryption keys.
Or better yet...
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I was about to post this, it was a great read for me a while ago.
The reality of quantum computers is so different than what you percieve from reading popular mechanics esque articles. For people who are curious, this article really helped me out:
https://www.ias.edu/ideas/2014/ambainis-quantum-computing
Computational sciences have become a massive industry and dominate sectors such as aerospace, mechanical and finance engineering. Could quantum computers not provide a significant leap in available power for these fields?
Arent this Google systems just the D-Wave quantum computers? Which use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_annealing instead of general quantum computing. Which is the reason they only are faster at encryption / searching databases and stuff.
But how to you build a quantum computer? I mean does it only need more power to generate more stuff faster ?
Can mods check insider credibilityI'm ready for the quantum based xbox scorpio.
I wish I actually understood quantum computing