I was reading up on Quantum computing and trying to wrap my head around qubits, superpositions etc....
And I realised that if Quantum computers reached the consumer market I would no longer be able to call myself a PC tech. I'd need a degree in Quantum physics just to understand the damn thing. Bah!
Well, D-Wave Systems has already sold it's first Quantum computer to Lockheed Martin.
Quote:
October 28th, 2011
With the construction of a new quantum computing center at its Information Sciences Institute campus in Marina del Rey, USC charts a new course into the future of computing.
WHAT: USC; Lockheed Martin, Inc.; and D-Wave Systems, Inc. will officially unveil the first commercial and operational quantum computer academic center at USC Viterbi School of Engineering's Information Sciences Institute.
ABOUT: Continuing its rich history with pioneering advances in high-performance computing and the Internet, USC is now exploring the promising future of quantum computing. Invoking superconducting technology, USC has constructed a high-fidelity computing center to house D-Wave?'s revolutionary quantum computing chip, recently purchased by Lockheed Martin and provided to USC for its applicability to information technology. USC and Lockheed Martin will work synergistically to explore the potential of the chip, which is at the cutting edge of technological advances.
The D-Wave chip has 128 quantum bits (or 'qubits') which have the capability of encoding the two digits of one and zero at the same time - as opposed to traditional bits, which distinctly encode either a one or a zero. This property, called 'superposition', will allow quantum computing systems to perform complicated calculations exponentially faster than traditional computers. With the construction of the multi-million dollar quantum computing center, USC now has the infrastructure in place to support future generations of quantum computer chips, positioning the school and its partners at the forefront of quantum computing research.
"The USC Lockheed Martin Quantum Computing Center will open new windows into the fascinating world of quantum computing," said USC Viterbi Dean Yannis C. Yortsos. "It will help advance our understanding of the potential of this new technology and provide a new paradigm in the quest for faster and more secure computing."
Hmm D-Wave used to run a DC project "Aqua@home". At some point this year when the system administrator was away someone else did some maintenance and deleted a whole bunch of files. They tried to repair the damage and fucked up some more and then the project was unplugged. They issued a statement that more results were no longer needed. Since A@h was a project for volunteers, they promised to publish the results. Found it back using the wayback machine:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110710160637/http://aqua.dwavesys.com/aqua_papers.html
From wikipedia:
Quote:
"Their claimed speedup over classical algorithms appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a paper my colleagues van Dam, Mosca and I wrote on "The power of adiabatic quantum computing." That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand, and therefore D-Wave's "quantum computer" even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer, and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits, would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone."
This reminds me of that physicist that claimed time was 2-dimensional, not 1-dimensional. His somewhat weird explanation didn't really make me grasp the whole concept. And thinking of time as moving not just in one direction but in several, in a time dimension we couldn't see or measure.. Yeah, right.
I was reading up on Quantum computing and trying to wrap my head around qubits, superpositions etc....
And I realised that if Quantum computers reached the consumer market I would no longer be able to call myself a PC tech. I'd need a degree in Quantum physics just to understand the damn thing. Bah!
Time is no longer a simple line from the past to the future, in a four dimensional world consisting of three dimensions of space and one of time. Instead, the physicist envisages the passage of history as curves embedded in a six dimensions, with four of space and two of time.
"There isn't just one dimension of time," Itzhak Bars of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles tells New Scientist. "There are two. One whole dimension of time and another of space have until now gone entirely unnoticed by us."
Bars claims his theory of "two time physics", which he has developed over more than a decade, can help solve problems with current theories of the cosmos and, crucially, has true predictive power that can be tested in a forthcoming particle physics experiment.
If it is confirmed, it could point the way to a "theory of everything" that unites all the physical laws of the universe into one, notably general relativity that governs gravity and the large scale structure of the universe, and quantum theory that rules the subatomic world.
Quote:
Changing our picture of time from a line to a plane (one to two dimensions) means that the path between the past and future could loop back on itself, allowing you to travel back and forwards in time and allowing the famous grandfather paradox, where you could go back and kill your grandfather before your mother was born, thereby preventing your own birth.
Bars first found hints of an extra time dimension in M-theory in 1995 and, when he looked into it, discovered the grandfather paradox and other fears could be overcome by using a new kind of symmetry - a mathematical property to work out the relationship between the quantities of position and momentum. It is this symmetry that might help reconcile the two mighty pillars of 20th-century physics, quantum mechanics and relativity.
@dingo_d: Is it so weird to use the Ising model for the state of those qubits?
Hmm, well Ising model is a solid state physics model which describes the states of spins iirc, and is used to describe the ferromagnetism. There is also Heisenberg model, but I can't remember which one is better. We learned that in statistical physics class.
I'm not quite sure what it's connection to quantum computing is, that's why I was kinda puzzled that the kitty knew it (and the mere fact that the poor kitty knows Ising model xD)...
"Quantum mechanics is actually, contrary to it's reputation, unbeliveably simple, once you take the physics out."
Scott Aaronson
chiv wrote:
thats true you know. newton didnt discover gravity. the apple told him about it, and then he killed it. the core was never found.
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