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
Perhaps a concrete example would help. Take a chess game. The basic way to make an AI opponent is to have the cpu run every possible move from the current game state to get all the next states, then repeat over and over again until the end of the game. Moves that eventually lead to victory are taken while those leading to defeat are avoided. Because of the sheer number of possible moves (about 10^40), the AI has to pick and choose which paths to explore - an algorithm picks those that look likely (you just took out their queen) and ignores those that look unlikely (you just lost your queen) and it will eventually run out of time (usually around 20 moves in the future) and have to guess which of those endings is the best. With quantum computing, you could take out all the guesswork and brute force your way through - it could calculate the result of each possible move all at once. This would allow the creation of a perfect chess player, much like you can play a perfect game of tic-tac-toe today.
Some NP problems have similar ways of guessing which paths to take (called heuristics), but many others don't. The reason current encryption methods are so hard to break is that there is no way to guess which paths to take. You have to individually examine each unique key separately with no idea when you will hit the right one.
Edited 2007-02-10 10:16