Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 9th Feb 2007 22:12 UTC
A Canadian start-up says it will demonstrate a working commercial quantum computer in Mountain View next week, years ahead of many experts' predictions. Venture capital-funded to the tune of USD 20m, Vancouver-based D-Wave says it has built a quantum computer with 16 qubits - the quantum world's version of a digital bit, but which simultaneously encodes 1 and 0, so can carry more information and solve problems more quickly.
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Member since:2005-10-13
I'm always a bit skeptical of these claims as well, but there are some differences which give me hope. These people are only claiming their QC can do a certain type of problem, not like a general purpose cpu. Also, this prototype only has 16 qubits which they claim is going to be quite a bit slower than conventional computers even on the np problems it will be good at. However, they claim to have the ability to ramp this up to 1000 in 2008 - this seems pretty quick to me, so I guess I'll have to wait and see.
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Member since:
2006-03-17
I'm always weary of this kind of announcement... if you remember the quantum-quack behind the 'atom chip' people...
http://www.atomchip.com/
yeah, okay..
Keep in mind, I'm optimistic that we'll have this technology, but it's applications will take another decade or two to finally debug (which will probably just tbe the start of another barrier/step). But if you tell me there's a quantum laptop (the link I put up used to have one listed!) ok, I've got some moon real estate to sell you!
I give this another 5-10 years before I realy take any notice of it. But that doesn't mean they should stop trying - it's just hard to filter out the BS unless you see it working in front of you.