Really freakin’ sweet. And bizarre. Makes me feel kind of like an ape jumping up and down at the big black monolith.

I didn’t realize work on quantum computers had come this far. Last I heard scientists were getting little quantum bits to talk together and that was it. One comment in the article put it well, it’s a bit like the “cold fusion” hysteria several years back. Still, it’s supposed to happen next week so we’ll see soon enough.

A company has devised a quantum computer to solve a particular NP-complete type of problem. I vaguely remember this from my Formal Languages & Automata class at Texas A&M. There’s certain classes of types of problems that can be solved programatically, and these are basically the ones that fall in the “hard” category (my apologies if I’ve oversimplified or misspoken, it has been a long time!).

I’m still awed by the very concepts of quantum mechanics. The power of such a computer is in the bits. In the PC you’re using to read this, everything is a zero or a one. Eithere as a pulse (or lack of a pulse) of electricity, or a magnetic or optical encoding (or lack of). But in the quantum world, every bit (qubit - “quantum bit”) is BOTH at the same time! It’s the classic Schrodinger’s Cat situation, literally. The bit is neither and simultaneously both zero and one until it interacts with the world around it (for example, when someone monitors what value it is), at which time it resolves to one value.

The challenge in quantum computing apparently has been isolating the machine from the real world. The company doing the demo has worked around this by making the machine solve only one problem (but, since it is NP-Complete, if one NP-complete can be solved theoretically any other NP-complete can be mapped to that problem and solved by the same algorithm). Thus, even though the qubits’ inputs are all in 0 and 1 state and the outputs are in all possible states for all possible inputs, they’re solving this by making the machine for only one possible set of inputs. Thus, it will already have the solution in its outputs, technically even before the inputs are given, if I recall an earlier article I blogged about some time back (yeah, in the quantum world effect can happen before cause, as if your head wasn’t hurting enough).

Ok, so mind-bending, existential quantum quandries aside, what does all this mean? Potentially guaranteed secure encryption (because if you do “peek” at it, the state changes and the message is no longer what it was before you peeked!), lightning fast resolution of complex issues, especially in areas around genetics. Possibly making it feasible to have drugs tailored to your DNA, medicines coming out for previously incurable diseases, etc.

And of course, I’m hoping for some evil-overlord AI-taking over the world action. One of the challenges in AI to really mimic the human brain’s pattern matching and input processing is the massively parallel processing we can accomplish. If you’ve got a few thousand qubits simultaneously in all possible states, you have a machine that can out-parallel process all of humankind, past, present and future. How’s that for food for thought?

Techworld.com - OS and Servers News - Quantum computer to debut next week