Eye Current

A Quantum Leap

Yesterday we entered a new era in computing, when D-wave Systems demonstrated the worlds first quantum computer. The announcement caught some observers by surprise.

Speculation about quantum computing has been assumed to be something decades away. Some of us wondered if it is even possible. Quantum computers hold the promise of solving complex computations simultaneously instead of the traditional one step at a time. It comes as a big surprise when D-Wave Systems Inc a company near Vancouver announced that they will be demonstrating their new Quantum Computer.

While this is being hailed as a commercially viable project there are skeptics:

Today, the company was supposed to show off a quantum computer sporting 16-qubits, the most of any quantum computer, commercial or otherwise, but still way too few to do anything important. What's a qubit? Qubits, or quantum bits, are what make quantum computers different from their digital ancestors. A digital bit can be either a one or a zero but not both at the same time. A qubit can. And that lets it do many calculations at once. So quantum computers should be capable of solving certain horrendous problems faster than conventional computers. Certain types of searches, the "traveling salesman" problem, and finding the factors of large integers fall into this category.

At it's heart the D-Wave computer, called Orion, is a chip of niobium that's been cooled to near absolute zero. It relies on a dark-horse technology known as adiabatic quantum computing. It and D-Wave have many critics.

The computer solves only one type of problem, which mathematicians call a two-dimensional Isling model in a magnetic field, but through some software trickery, other problems can be recast as this problem. At the demonstration, they planned to show off its flexibility with two programs. First, they were to show how Orion runs a pattern-matching application that searches a database of molecules. The second could be called the wedding planner's dilemma, in that it is designed to figure out the best seating arrangement for a group of people according to certain constraints, such as Uncle Sam can't sit next to Aunt Jean but has to be at the same table as Grandpa Harry.

Yet, as in any new technology, proof of concept is the biggest step to overcome, and while we may never see quantum computers on our desktops. We can expect them to be more powerful and more commonplace in the near future.

Labels: computers

posted by Ray L. @ 3:33 AM