First Quantum Processor Performs Simple Tasks, Illustrates The Concept

Is the cat alive and dead?

blore40

@atlasfugged: Ugh. FAIL.
What I meant to say:

... only took an undergraduate Quantum Mechanics course so some of what Jepzilla was talking about above was above my pay-grade, hence the original comment.

@AreWeThereYeti: Like I said above, doesn't whether or not collapse occurs depend on how you interpret the situation? I was taught that the observation of the cat results in the wave function going from being a superposition of the dead state and alive state to being expressive of only one of those states, the observed state.

atlasfugged

@AreWeThereYeti: Like I said above, doesn't whether or not collapse occurs depend on how you interpret the situation? I was taught that the observation of the cat results in the wave function going from being a superposition of the dead state and alive state to being expressive of only one of those states, the observed state.

atlasfugged

@ripfire: To the outside party you don't know (the whole cat in the box - dead or alive thing). That's why you have to tell it what to look for to get the correct answer. For instance, if you are breaking encryption it will use every possible state at the same instance but will be programmed to look for readable words which will then reveal the desired state. Good book that touches on it is "The Code Book" by Simon Singh

Discofunk

What happens when THESE processors overheat? :-0

@jepzilla: Thank you for that jepzilla.

What interests me is the results of data storage and computation in a realm of physics that's effectively theoretical.

@tkohrs2002: He is also saying that when you open the box, there becomes two of YOU, one who sees the cat dead, and one who sees the cat alive. That's what the "universal wave function" means: waves never collapse, YOU become the wave.

AreWeThereYeti

@nutbastard: When you get down to nuts and bolts, all technology is an evolution of some previously existing technology. It's just that sometimes we don't quite see that evolutionary path. Watch "The Day the Universe Changed" or the "Connections" series with James Burke and you'll see all the, well, connections that led us to our great breakthroughs, none of which happened in a vacuum.

I mean, computers are the result of an offshoot of early industrial revolution era WEAVING technology, of all things. Who could have predicted that? Look carefully and you can find all the precursors for the technology of spaceflight and how they've been leading up to Apollo 11 for centuries. It's not uncommon for the technology to already exist somewhere in obscurity because no one realized its significance until the right person (or people) comes along and has that eureka moment.

@everyone: Energy is one of the main problems with the future not being so grand. Moving sidewalks for instance would take a lot of energy to run 24/7 in thousands of locations at once. Plus you'd probably want to make them magnetically turned to reduce wear'n'tear.

We need an energy supply that can provide us with all the energy we could ever possibly need. So that massive amounts of energy no longer cost's money, and things can be implemented without electrical cost worries.

Kakkoister

"The processor is made of two artificial atoms (each made of a billion aluminum atoms)..."

What?!? Atoms are made of atoms?!?

Next Question of te Day: is shrodinger's cat dead or alive?

tkohrs2002

@atlasfugged: Basically he is saying that the cat is BOTH dead and alive. (I bet now you are even more confused :) )

tkohrs2002

Don't think about the quantum computer or it will stop working!

@jepzilla: I wish I could understand what you just said.

atlasfugged

@ideaman2020: Yeah, you'll need to bust out Schrodinger's equation every time you get a buffer overflow.

atlasfugged

@AreWeThereYeti: Yeah, I'm a believer in the MWI too, which is to say I believe in a universal wavefunction (gosh, that sounds almost religious). Personally I think QC gives a much clearer picture of the merits of interpretations than other formulations, like the standard model. Once you understand the math, MWI becomes the obvious interpretation because it doesn't require the invention of any new concepts. Just keep making your hilbert space bigger!

Anyway, as I understand it under the MW hypothesis you don't get an exponential growth in computing power. While the expressive power grows exponentially, the convergence rate of Grover's decreases as the dimensionality of the space increases. Because the convergence rate slows, it'll only ever give a quadratic speedup over the best classical algorithm, regardless of the input length. You get similar behavior in all quantum algorithms.

jepzilla

@Ubik2501: Gawker comments uses more and less than (can't type em cos they tend to dissaper)

@Ubik2501: Aw nuts. Pretend those are HTML tags.

@ripfire: I think I saw a [b]2[/b] in there somewhere. *shudder*

Does it use tetryon particles too? Is there an anomalous reading on this diagram?

VideoVampire

If a qubit splits into two universes and no one is there to hear/see it... is it still a qubit?

kchendricks

Was this also reverse-engineered from Megatron?

chrstphr

@Lupison: According to Schrodinger, we may already be dead - it's just that nobody has noticed yet.

That's it, I'm staying inside today.

taodude

@PennyG: Until you look at it n start asking it questions then it has to decide.

@ripfire: It's both.

PennyG

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: You mean past future or present has let tande04 down? sorry, nitpicking

Stikman008

@Alduron: First, they have to write all possible Giz Explains Quantum Computing articles, then it's a simple matter of sorting through the results for the best one. It's possible they're not sorting at the speed of light though, which would explain the delay.

@jepzilla: excellent explanation of the many-worlds-hypothesis, which I also think is true, but you might want to point out that the many-worlds-hypothesis is not yet accepted as the mainstream explanation of what is going on. THere are lots of emminent physicists who strongly disagree with the many-worlds-hypothesis. One of the biggest problems is that with the many-worlds-hypothesis, you should get exponential growth of computing power with additional bits, but that isn't the case. Quantum computers are powerful, but not that powerful.

AreWeThereYeti

@misterWho3GS: Moving sidewalks...now available at an airport near you!!!

@AreWeThereYeti: sorry I miscpelled that: scpell!

AreWeThereYeti

@OMG Pizza Party!!1!: But at least it can spell.

AreWeThereYeti

@nutbastard: I agree with just about everything you said, except that they didn't really achieve faster than light transmission of data using entanglement. It's very subtle and tricky. You can get instantaneous, faster-than-light effects, but no absolutely no data can be transmitted using them that can be distinguished from randomness- you have to transmit some additional information at the speed of light, which you then combine at the other end with the faster-than-light data, which then produces data that is finally non-random. Quantum teleportation works the same- some effects move instantaneously, but the result is useless until the speed-of-light additional data gets there.

AreWeThereYeti

@Alduron: Basically.

@jepzilla:

So debugging really will be a bitch.

wkm001

@jepzilla: You've suddenly made the LHC seem safer than my future PC. Well done. :D

@deanbmmv: or

@tarzan69:

@BigDogues: I don't know, let me have a look...Oh there dead, damn Qauntum Computing.

@32ndnote:

that's why i've been putting off learning programming theory. i can knock out some python here and there, but the inner workings of a microprocessor are still mysteriously magical to me.

@streetceltic: $81.92million to fill your iPod. Though it still is cheaper to pirate them and get caught, $1.42million don't seem to much now.

@Lupison: Yes, but our children will learn how to occupy multiple states. Perhaps they will be the first generation of eternal humans.

@jepzilla:

That, arguably, is the best explanation on Quantum Computing I've ever read. Thanks!

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: Yes, exactly! Also, where is my moving sidewalk? Does no one else find this important?

@tande04:

yep. what is the ipod but a futuristic walkman? what is my HDTV... besides just being a better TV? and incrementally better at that - from the time TV came out until what, 10 years ago, it was all 240x320. and it took us 60 years to get that up to 1900 x 1080? and still 720 is far from being ubiquitous? so really what we see is that it took us 60 years to make our TVs ~2.5x more detailed.

i think what happened is there were all these leaps and bounds in the early 20th century that drew an overly optimistic projected curve of progress. people had lives that went from horses and steam trains to the model T and television, human flight. If you were born in 1890, and managed to live until 1970, you saw it all, from horses to walking on the fucking moon, in a mere 80 years time. you would HAVE to imagine that in another 40 after that we'd be way ahead of where we are now.

so no flying cars, no civilian space flight, no holographic projectors, no full immersion virtual reality, no auto-dry jacket or self-lacing nikes. no new energy sources really. no fundamentally new, unprecedented technologies.

there're some exceptions, but they're highly singular - for example i believe someone achieved a faster than light transmission of data utilizing quantum entanglement. we've done single particle teleportation. quantum computing is making some moves. materials science has made some major improvements as well. but all in all, it's just been getting cheaper - that's the real profit of this whole last half century, is that it's gotten cheaper.

@TheCrudMan: For the iPod overkill? Microsoft:"It would cost you millions of dollars to fill your iPod"

streetceltic

I wrote a good (well great) article about Quantum Computing seven years ago for Linux Format.

It's here:
[www.channelle.co.uk]

Andy Channelle

WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!

Lupison

"We're going to be Giz Explaining what's up with quantum computing soon."

Just as soon as you guys understand it?

Alduron

@ideaman2020: I'm gonna feel like such an idiot in 20 years when quantum computing just makes sense to college kids and I'm still thinking in 1s and 0s.

I'm guessing quantum debugging won't be any harder for them than current debugging is for us.

@Fractal the Meek: Damn. That is funny!

daath

@BigDogues: D-Wave systems didn't build a quantum computer, not in the sense that most of the academic world means. They built a very advanced analog computer that uses quantum effects, but their computer wouldn't be able to maintain any entanglement or prevent decoherence. Without that, all the interesting quantum algorithms won't work.

It's like building a classical computer that can't do a conditional branch. Not really a computer in the sense that people normally mean.

jepzilla

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: No, just that it doesn't seem like the "future".

The last 20 years or so brought improvements in many different fields but for the most part it was just an extension of technology that was around for those 20 years. The internet evolved from RBS systems to facebook but it was still just an evolution. Same with cars, computers, etc. The closest thing (IMO) that we got was they kinda modeled flip phones after ST communicators (which even cellphone technology, while getting smaller and cheaper was still just steps). Now there are actual revolutions. Completely changing how computers work like this. Completely changing the tools we use to perceive reality.

It just seemed like (again, to me) while the last 20 years brought improvements its only been the last 5 (or maybe even 2 or 3) that have brought actual revolutions which to me seem like the "future".

tande04

This makes Butter's brain hurt.

Digital9

SkyNet, here we come!

Not 100% accurate, but here's a way to understand a quantum computer: If you've ever heard of the concept that whenever there's some chance, the universe 'splits' and both events occur, that's what's going on. When the quantum computer makes a qubit 1 and 0 at the same time, it basically uses a truly random event to determine which value the bit will be. The universe 'splits' and down one path there is a 1, and down the other there is a 0.

Except the quantum computer 'splits' the universe in such a way that the two universes can interact with each other. It is even possible to have the quantum computer compute something on every input at once and then search through all the different universes to find an answer; this is known as Gover's algorithm.

The critical part is coherence: making sure that the only difference between the different universes is inside the quantum computer itself. So long as coherence is maintained, the universes can merge back together and all you're left with is the right answer (99.99999% of the time). If coherence isn't maintained then the universes can't remerge, and you don't get a correct answer. Decoherence is actually extremely hard to deal with, and the biggest engineering challenge in designing a quantum computer.

jepzilla

@ripfire: Yeah, quantum computing is cool.

But quantum debugging is a bitch...

This is so weird. And, even when everything I own is embedded with quantum processors, it will still be so weird.

loving the illustration.

so enlightening

/sarcasm

can't you find something a bit more quantum-ey . . .

tarzan69

@32ndnote: ...Carbon nanotubes, brain-controlled computing, Asimo, Project Natal...

Dude, the other day I sat back in my chair at work and had like an inverted deja-vu moment imagining the future with all of this crap. Shit's goin DOWN!

I thought this had already been done. Whatever happened to D-Wave Systems? Did they get lost in the quantum universe?

BigDogues

@Jack of all Tirades R.O.A.C.H.: All, I'm saying is that I don't have a pet robot that wears a giant computer medallion a la Buck Rogers. So, yes, the future has let me down.

ARP

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