Quantum computer launch
p2pnet.net News:- You know about PCs. Now meet the QC, or quantum computer, once the stuff of science fiction.
In the summer of 2005, Canada’s D-Wave, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, promised to have such a system up and running within three years.
And it now looks as though it’s kept its word because it says on February 15, it’ll make history as, “the world`s first – and only – provider of quantum computing systems designed to run commercial applications”.
“Though quantum computing is still in its infancy, experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of qubits (quantum bits)”, says the Wikipedia, going on:
Research in both theoretical and practical areas continues at a frantic pace, and many national government and military funding agencies support quantum computing research to develop quantum computers for both civilian and national security purposes, such as cryptanalysis.
It is widely believed that if large-scale quantum computers can be built, they will be able to solve certain problems asymptotically faster than any classical computer. Quantum computers are different from other computers such as DNA computers and computers based on transistors, even though these may ultimately use some kind of quantum mechanical effect (for example covalent bonds). Some computing architectures such as optical computers may use classical superposition of electromagnetic waves, but without some specifically quantum mechanical resource such as entanglement, they do not share the potential for computational speed-up of quantum computers.
The post continues:
A classical computer has a memory made up of bits, where each bit holds either a one or a zero. The device computes by manipulating those bits, i.e. by transporting these bits from memory to (possibly a suite of) logic gates and back. A quantum computer maintains a vector of qubits. A qubit can hold a one, or a zero, or a superposition of these. A quantum computer operates by manipulating those qubits, i.e. by transporting these bits from memory to (possibly a suite of) quantum logic gates and back.
Qubits for a quantum computer can be implemented using particles with two spin states: “up” and “down” (typically written |0rangle and |1rangle); in fact, any system possessing an observable quantity A which is conserved under time evolution and such that A has at least two discrete and sufficiently spaced consecutive eigenvalues, is a suitable candidate for implementing a qubit, since any such system can be mapped onto an effective spin-1/2.
D-Wave is a privately held corporation founded in May, 1999.
Also See:
kept its word – There’s PCs, then there’s QCs, June 22, 2005
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