[NTLUG:Discuss] [WTLUG:discuss] Quantum Computer and linux (fwd)

[Steve Baker]

Chad Foreman wrote:
> 
> thought this might be of some interest to y'all

This doesn't sound true to me.

I was listening to two people who are the leading US researchers in
this field on NPR's Science Friday just a few weeks ago - and they
were saying that it would be *YEARS* before enough of the kinks were
worked out to make a practical Quantum computer.

I strongly suspect that this is one of two things:

  * There was something on slashdot a while back about some people
    who have written a SIMULATION of a Quantum computer - that
    happens to run on Linux.

  * It's possible that this is just a couple of quantum bits (QBits)
    strung together - that uses a conventional Linux computer to
    control it.  That would be about right for the current state
    of the art.

Quantum computers are not going to be full blown machines - they
will be more like specialized math co-processors used when a
massively parallel computation is needed.  You might use such
a beast to find prime factors of a large number for some
cryptography thing or something like that - but a Quantum
computer won't be running compilers and text editors and
windowing systems.

Strictly serial operations on a Quantum computer would be
essentially no faster than a regular computer (and possibly
an awful lot slower).

> They go on to project:
> "The prototype should prove itself as the world's first efficient quantum
> computing system, being many billions of times faster than a conventional PC
> and capable of storing multiple terabytes of data."

This isn't an untrue statement - but it leaves out some critical
facts....like you could store terabytes of data on a handful
of Qbits - but retrieving just one item of that data would 'collapse
the quantum state' of the Qbits thereby erasing everything but the data
you need.

It'll solve the travelling salesman problem billions of times faster
than a PC - but spell checking a document would be no faster at
all - even assuming you could figure out how to make it *do* that.

-- 
Steve Baker                  http://web2.airmail.net/sjbaker1
sjbaker1 at airmail.net (home)  http://www.woodsoup.org/~sbaker
sjbaker at hti.com      (work)