Sanchek
08-13-2004, 04:39 PM
Who knows, maybe we can have a thread here about something other than politics.
This is a topic I never really followed or had bothered to understand, until just recently. I accidentally picked up my roommate's copy of Business 2.0 and ran across an article in it about the race to build a working quantum computer. It's pretty interesting stuff.
In a normal computer today, when you add more processing capability to it, you increase its computational power linearly. If you were to move from a 32 bit chip to a 64 bit chip, you've roughly doubled how much it can do in one clock cycle (of course it isn't that simple, but for the sake of discussion it's good enough). With a quantum computer, each bit (called a qubit) will exponentially increase the computer's power.
Even the first, fairly elementary, working quantum computers are expected to be literally billions of times more powerful than any supercomputer currently available. The practical applications of something like that are endless. Examples I've read about are fast and precise molecular reaction modeling for pharmaceuticals, weather forecasting that actually works, and obviously it would completely redefine the entire cryptology field since it could break any current encryption in seconds.
The article I read said that the leaders in the field currently are NEC, IBM, NIST, University of Kansas, and a fairly small startup company called D-Wave.
It all sounds awfully promising. Just about any field or industry you can think of could be transformed by that kind of computational power increase. Anyone here been actually keeping up with this stuff?
This is a topic I never really followed or had bothered to understand, until just recently. I accidentally picked up my roommate's copy of Business 2.0 and ran across an article in it about the race to build a working quantum computer. It's pretty interesting stuff.
In a normal computer today, when you add more processing capability to it, you increase its computational power linearly. If you were to move from a 32 bit chip to a 64 bit chip, you've roughly doubled how much it can do in one clock cycle (of course it isn't that simple, but for the sake of discussion it's good enough). With a quantum computer, each bit (called a qubit) will exponentially increase the computer's power.
Even the first, fairly elementary, working quantum computers are expected to be literally billions of times more powerful than any supercomputer currently available. The practical applications of something like that are endless. Examples I've read about are fast and precise molecular reaction modeling for pharmaceuticals, weather forecasting that actually works, and obviously it would completely redefine the entire cryptology field since it could break any current encryption in seconds.
The article I read said that the leaders in the field currently are NEC, IBM, NIST, University of Kansas, and a fairly small startup company called D-Wave.
It all sounds awfully promising. Just about any field or industry you can think of could be transformed by that kind of computational power increase. Anyone here been actually keeping up with this stuff?