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Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
11/09/09
So, you are about to die. People have been dying for thousands of years. Before people, others creatures were dying as well. To understand how many beings have died you first have to understand how many have lived... #trillions
08/20/09
08/20/09
Oh yeah, and Crysis freezes.
08/20/09
08/19/09
It's even been shown that for certain classes of problems, *emulating* quantum computing on a regular processor is faster.
As with most things - it's not an either/or situation, it's an also/and situation. Current technology (or some future analogy of it) will be with us for a LONG time.
08/19/09
Ordinary computers solve problems by breaking them down into tiny pieces and working on each piece one at a time. There is no problem they can't solve given enough time- bigger, harder problems just get turned into more pieces and take more time to finish.
Quantum computers, on the other hand, work best when you don't break down the problems. If you have a computer with enough qubits to describe the entire problem, then it can check every possible answer at the same time. This only works if the computer has enough qubits for the entire problem, but its a lot faster than trying each answer one-by-one.
For NP problems, this can mean the difference between being done in an instant versus waiting a few billion years. But for most problems, there are much better ways to solve them with ordinary computers, and quantum computers don't really offer a lot of advantage.
I expect when quantum computers start getting into the hundreds of reliable qubits, the government will take up an intense interest in the research and keeping it away from everybody else. Many billions will be spent so that the NSA can easily break everybody's codes, and nobody else can. Codebreaking is really the only obvious application for quantum computers under 100K qubits. After that breaks down and we get into the millions of qubits, certain major corporations will start getting one or two- Google for search algorithms, UPS for route planning (no, really), etc. Maybe someday (not in the next 25 years) we'll see them as secondary processors (a QPU?). I doubt if they will ever primary means of computation, though. For non-NP problems, they're just not worth the trouble.
08/19/09
08/19/09
My cats are wondering why quantum physics is so predisposed to locking felines in boxes with uranium atoms and poison gas.
08/19/09
i wonder if his cat survived, who could stand the curiosity of not knowing if his cat was alive or dead...
08/19/09
08/19/09
08/19/09
08/19/09
08/19/09
08/19/09
I understood it as our current computers being powered by one dead cat and quantum computers being powered by two live cats.
08/19/09
Now, if you leave one cat in the box, then eventually it'll die of starvation; what happens to the cat you set free?
08/19/09
I wonder if they increased the bit size of the keys in public key encryption enough, would it eventually be able to stave off attempts to crack it using quantum computing?
Enquiring minds want to know.
08/19/09
That means that no cloud data we would keep would be safe! Or not?
Or is it that by the time the "code breaking" get quantum, the code protecting will too?
08/19/09
08/19/09
I suppose the fact that it takes dozens of years to develop this kind of stuff helps. Sure, someone drops a functioning quantum computer designed for brute-force hacking into 2009, sure, internet's dead. But since it takes a long time (and a lot of people) to develop, you get people who build better ways to defend against malicious attackers as the attacks themselves are developed.
Crack WEP, someone makes WPA. It's a cycle.
08/19/09
As I understand it, a quantum computer's parallel processing makes factoring much faster. Instead of trying each factor one at a time, you can try them all simultaneously through the magic of superposition, so factoring a large number becomes trivial. Even if you have a really big key, a quantum computer with sufficient qbits can break it really quickly just based on the way it factors numbers compared to a standard processor.
Hopefully by the time those kinds of quantum computers roll around we'll have gotten quantum cryptography working, which is 100% unbreakable due to the laws of physics.
08/19/09
08/19/09
08/19/09
As for the OP's comment about quantum mechanics being "logically flawed," um, what? How so? And why exactly do you think quantum computing wouldn't provide a "good logics system"? There are certainly some issues, but assuming they can be worked out, qubits will replace bits in our lifetime.
08/19/09
This may sound backward but it actually is far better since a datum ( a bit in digital circuits ) can hold MORE than two values. This allows you to hold more data, process more data, and do it faster. As of this moment, there is one basic electronic component that can do this. It is the memristor. [en.wikipedia.org] This magical little component can 'store' the last voltage that was passed through it. It therefore can be described as the beginning of analog computing.
But then we have a problem. Since analog data is not discrete ( clearly defined states ) there will have to be some sort of solution for measuring it.
08/19/09
08/19/09
08/19/09
It's crap like this that spoils my dream.
Ah, well. *grumble* Crazy flying kids, with their qPods. *mumble, grumble* Quit floating above my lawn.
08/19/09
Superposition states that for systems with multiple inputs (A,B,C) you can evaluate there effect on the output (D) separately. So to find D, you set B and C to 0 and just figure out what A does... then you repeat this process.
The goofy thing is that a quantum bit occupies all states, which means that you solve for D just by evaluating it. Because D is the sum of all effects A, B, and C, and since they are quantum bits when you read the result, it has the all the solutions to whatever the input was.
Or magic... take your pick.
08/19/09
08/19/09
[www.voodish.co.uk]
Wanna enslave all humans, Mr. Jangles?
08/19/09
Pinky:
- "Gee Brain, what do you want to do tonight?"
The Brain:
- "The same thing we do every night, Pinky—try to take over the world!