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.