I totally don't know wht that means but IWantIt!
Posted on 02/09/2007 11:28:07 AM PST by US admirer
Twenty years before most scientists expected it, a commercial company has announceda quantum computer that promises to massively speed up searches and optimisation calculations.
D-Wave of British Columbia has promised to demonstrate a quantum computer next Tuesday, that can carry out 64,000 calculations simultaneously (in parallel "universes"), thanks to a new technique which rethinks the already-uncanny world of quantum computing. But the academic world is taking a wait-and-see approach.
D-Wave is the world's only "commercial" quantum computing company, backed by more than $20 million of venture capital (there are more commercial ventures in the related field of quantum cryptography). Its stated aim is to eventually produce commercially available quantum computers that can be used online or shipped to computer rooms, where they will solve intractable and expensive problems such as financial optimisation. It has been predicted that quantum computing will make current computer security obsolete, cracking any current cryptography scheme by providing an unlimited amount of simultaneous processing resources. Multiple quantum states exist at the same time, so every quantum bit or "qubit" in such a machine is simultaneously 0 and 1. D-Wave's prototype has only 16 qubits, but systems with hundreds of qubits would be able to process more inputs than there are atoms in the universe.
Scientists in the world's many quantum science departments are looking anxiously at whether the demonstration - linked to a computer museum in Mountain View California, will vindicate their work or cast doubt upon it.
"This is somewhat like claims of cold fusion," said Professor Andrew Steane of Oxford University's Centre for Quantum Computing. "I doubt that this computing method is substantially easier to achieve than any other."
Others are more enthusiastic: "I'll be a bit of a sceptic till I see what they have done," said Professor Seth Lloyd of MIT. "But I'm happy these guys are doing it." Lloyd is one of the scientists who helped develop the "adiabatic" model of quantum computing which D-Wave's system exploits - a method which D-Wave believes will sidestep the problems which have restricted progress in quantum computing so far.
See #19......
Hehehehe, Good comback!
See #10.
Wow, imagine how many windows bluescreens it can display per second!
Who knew?
Oh! Qubits. Never mind.
If a terrorist got ahold of a true quantum computer, the world would end a couple of days later. All security would be out the window. A trillion dollars would get stolen overnight, world financial systems would collapse, followed by blood in the streets, you get the picture.
It's not possible to cut every computer in the world simultaneiously over to quantum cryptography. So a real quantum computer would be the deadliest weapon on earth. Far more dangerous than nukes.
Fortunately, this company is most likely full of crap.
There's a simple cryptography scheme that no amount of computer power can ever crack: one-time pad encryption.
How it works: add a random sequence of numbers to 2 pads of paper, each sheet having a number printed on it, and send one copy to the recipient ahead of time. To use, combine the random number in sequence with a number representing a character to encode. Then destroy that sheet of paper. Decryption is the reverse. As long as the pad is truly random, is never reused, and only the recipient has a copy, then the encryption can never ever be cracked using any method.
That was rude... There was no picture there...
For those who are not familiar with the wording and terminology, NP-complete problems are problems which become unmanageable as the number of items in the problem increase.
The classic example is the so-called Traveling Salesman problem. The problem is to find the most efficient route for a traveling salesman to visit all the customers while only visiting each customer once and only using each connection between them once. Simple to explain, simple to diagram the complete population of customers, extremely difficult to find all possible journies. For a population of say 5 customers one could find the shortest (most efficient) journey by hand as there are 2 to the fifth or 32 solutions. Increase it to 10 customers and you have 1,024 solutions. Now it would take several hours if not days. Make it 20 and you are talking months or years. At a hundred you don't have enough time in your life. Look at a typical telephone network for a small city with several thousand connections. It is currently impossible to find the best route to send a phone call on.
Most of these problems are "solved" today with approximations. They are constantly encountered by researchers, engineers, medical personel. If it were possible to find the best solution in a reasonable amount of time the savings in money, effort, energy, etc., is huge. There are literally hundreds of these problems which have very practical usage in today's world. So having a means to solve them will have a tremendous impact on all aspects of our lives, including health, communication, finance, etc., etc.
And as stated above "POP".
Yeah that's real practical when I do my online banking, thanks for that.
But did Marx have a Nobel Prize in economics?
Come to think of it, if Yassar Arafat can win the Nobel Peace Prize, I guess anything is possible.
Well the bank could give you a little thumb drive with enough random numbers on it that it would work fine for you.
Cool. Now Windows can lose your data in 64 parallel dimensions.
Except that the bank's computers would be hacked so the theives would have both sets of numbers.
It is only partly true the one-pad encryption is unbreakable. The real impact is there is no second message to decrypt if the first one is broken. The big problem is the transmission of the number to the recipient. Now we are back into the world of couriers, stealing the pad(s), moles, spies, etc. So the system is not really feasible in today's high speed world of information. For single transactions with time to get the number securely to the recipient, yes. To handle the millions of banking or security transactions a day, no.
ever since I came out of the closet at age 3 when my father had to tie a pork chop around my neck to get the dog to lick my cheek...
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