Topic: New Quantium Computer

[Xptical]

Researchers say they have designed a tiny crystal that acts like a quantum computer so powerful it would take a computer the size of the known universe to match it.

I really want to get excited about quantum computing.  But why is it that every article I see uses crap statements like the one above?

Anyway, they go on to state that the "computer" is 300 atoms.  I'm guessing they mean the processing core is actually 300 atoms.  They don't state how many qbits are in there, but they do state that every qbit means an exponential boost in processing power.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2012/04/26/3489504.htm



If anyone has any experience with QCs, I'd be interested to know how they interface with the cores.  It seems like they would need their own assembly language and probably higher-level languages as well.  Not to mention completely new algorithms.

And the thing that really boggles my mind is how does the core settle on a "right" answer?  Say I'm moving my character in Skyrim and someone shoots an arrow at my knee, the cores would calculate every possible answer from getting hit, to the arrow missing, to the castle behind me becoming a giant vampire chicken.  So how does the system know which outcome is "right"?

[Guillermo]

However, in practice infinite resources are never available and the computational basis of 500 qubits, for example, would already be too large to be represented on a classical computer because it would require 2⁵⁰⁰ complex values to be stored.[6]  (For comparison, a terabyte of digital information stores only 243  discrete on/off values) Nielsen and Chuang point out that "Trying to store all these complex numbers would not be possible on any conceivable classical computer."

considering that 2⁵⁰⁰ is about 10¹⁵⁰, and that the known universe has about 10⁸² particles. Then that statement makes sense.

[Shibboleth]

I am pretty sure a quantum computer would use magnets.