Submitted by For the first time the components that underlie quantum computing’s great potential – qubits – have been linked on chips like those in conventional computers. Two US research teams used superconducting circuits to make two of the quantum components linked by a quantum information cable or bus. The bits that work together on calculations in a normal computer can exist in two states – either 0 or 1. But qubits can inhabit both at once, allowing them to process many calculations simultaneously when they get together.
before we have quantum x86 CPU’s running quantum-tech antivirus software and malware also running, quantum-tech, trying to find everything at once to send out?
Wow, the first step towards the next generation of supercomputing has been taken by two different groups.
Now if we can only develop super conductive materials that work at room temperature, we’d no longer have to worry about Moor’s law!
What say you guy’s, five or ten years?
“What say you guy’s, five or ten years?”
I’m thinking more like 20 to 30 before we get anything that is both remotely useful, and relatively affordable…
Sadly, I have to agree with you there. I guess my enthusiasm for the subject was getting the better of me 😉
WOW
In 20-30 years time we are going to be looking back at press coverage like this in exactly the same way we are looking at pictures of ENIAC today 🙂
Huge labs, full of equipment to achieve what today we only take for granted.
Room temperature is the least problem with this kind of equipment. Other quantum interactions could also take place with particles that are all around us and alter the outcome of a calculation…
I guess we are going to be needing even more strong Error Correction Codes now.
The Pegasus (A “supercomputer” of the 50s) had 80% of its equipment doing Error Detection and Correction to data that was stored to mercury delay lines (!) with a capacity of about 2kB for <2 seconds (!!!!!)
So i kind of see history repeating itself with these machines.
I dare to sound very oldfashioned, but I think there is no way to make materials supercondutive in room temperature. But at temperature of liquid nitrogen it would be just fine. I make my bet on PCs with organic elements instead.
> I think there is no way to make materials supercondutive in room temperature.
Why do you think that? Certainly it is difficult to get electrons to form Cooper pairs when there is a lot of thermal energy, but I haven’t seen anything that makes me believe room-temperature superconductivity is impossible. Who knows, we may even discover a similar effect that doesn’t involve Bose-Einstein condensation…
> But at temperature of liquid nitrogen it would be just fine.
That’s already doable; there are several high-temperature superconductors with a critical temperature well above N2’s boiling point (~77 K).
> I make my bet on PCs with organic elements instead.
That takes a much bigger leap of faith than room-temperature superconductors, seeing how current organic and polymer-based electronics have carrier mobilities a few orders of magnitude lower than the cheapest semiconductors. If you’re suggesting an even more fantastic paradigm shift in computing than “simple” organic-based electronics (ala OLEDs), then its a bigger leap still.
That being said, I have to wholly agree with atici. I haven’t yet seen any significant indications that quantum computers, even if made practical, would be useful for much more than highly specialized cryptographic applications. Most tasks are still far better suited for the stored program architecture computer that we’re so familiar with. Not that this eliminates their utility, but I don’t see any merit in assuming that quantum computers can replace “traditional” computers. I always get the distinct feeling that the mystical term “quantum mechanics” gives quantum computers a much more impressive aura than they deserve.
High temperature superconductors are interesting in their own rite; modern high-speed digital IC speed is severely bound by interconnect delays, and having practical interconnects with exactly zero resistivity and the property of magnetic field exclusion would be amazing.
Having worked on quantum computation for my PhD thesis, I can tell a few things:
– Quantum computation is not looking super promising. They are great for some special applications (factoring for instance) but it’s not like they will have an impact on mainstream computation anytime soon.
– Quantum communication/encryption on the other hand already has extraordinary results and future potential and there’re commercial devices that work.
No matter how many times they talk about this stuff, the explanation of the details never make any sense. Has anyone read anything that spells this out? (I do realize it’s not exactly an easy thing to explain, let alone comprehend)