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New Idea Could Lead to Quantum RAM

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Aug 22, 2007 09:12 AM
from the cat-not-included dept.
Hardware Science
KentuckyFC writes to tell us that scientists in Italy and the US have designed a new method of retrieving information from quantum memory that could allow them to create "Quantum RAM". "Giovannetti's idea is to send the address down the branching tree of connections in such a way that it only affects one switch at a time. The first address qubit sets a switch at the first branching point to go one way or the other; the second qubit is sent that way and sets the switch at the next branching point, and so on. The total number of entangled quantum systems is smaller, and they are not so susceptible to interference, allowing information to be retrieved from memory intact."
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Submission: Quantum RAM by KentuckyFC (1144503)
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  • talk about density (Score:5, Interesting)

    by downix (84795) on Wednesday August 22 2007, @09:15AM (#20317957) Homepage
    atomic-scale memory would create huge waves.

    It also could help out on the heat issues as well.

    I mean, think about how many atoms are in a normal piece of memory.... yeouch that's a lot of RAM!
  • could this be used to implement extremely efficient binary trees? the structure sounds ideal to be but im hardly an expert.

  • Quantum porn (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2007, @09:20AM (#20318027)
    [Guy 1] Hey, I had porn loaded into memory

    [Guy 2] You changed it by looking at it!
    • Wonder if that would stand up in court for any pedos?
      Defendent:Your Honour, I know it's someone under-age *now* but it was grannie-pr0n when I downloaded it, really it was.

    • [Guy 1] Hey, I had porn loaded into memory

      [Guy 2] You changed it by looking at it!
      Even worse, is that vagooter on a real woman or just a well-crafted trannie post-op? And would the probability of that be uncertain until the video was viewed? Wow. I call this conundrum "Schrödinger's pussy."
  • I know I don't really^H^H^H^H^H understand quantum computer, but don't their output rely on some random effects to quickly generate statistics that would take ages with regular brute force computing? So would a quantum RAM provide the stored value only X% of the time?

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      A quantum register can be in a superposition of multiple states. For every possible state, there is a corresponding number called a probability amplitude. The square of the absolute value of the probability amplitude is equal to the probability that when observed, that state is the one you see, so naturally, the squares of the absolute values have to add up to 1. A quantum gate maps a single state onto a superposition of states.

      Maybe an example will make this clearer. A quantum state is often written as a k

  • I don't see it on NewEgg (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 22 2007, @09:24AM (#20318069)
    How else will be I be able to add it to my gaming rig. Do you think this memory has lights on it? I hope so, and that'd look great through my case's side-windows.
  • Nothing in this really sounds like a new idea except that using this method would have some benefit on the quantum level. It's just a balanced binary decision tree implemented as a (quantum, in this case) circuit such that leaf nodes are stored data and addresses are qbit streams. Am I missing something?
  • Worse is time incoherency or noise that malforms the data long transit. Imagine the as8k lskcc; fifif88*&&2/213k djc
  • Unfortunately, with Quantum Leap RAM, the contents are impaired with random bits erased, in a swiss cheese fashion.
    • "Quantum Leap RAM"

      Does that mean my data can travel back and forth through time, but only within my own lifetime?

  • The last thing I need when attempting to invade my enemies' nano-castles is to have the ram start exhibiting quantum effects and tunneling through the gates!
  • I mean, isn't every existing quantum computing process a simulation of what might happen if we could actually build something?

    Or, to put it another way, isn't quantum computing a mix of wild theories, vaporware, simulation, and experiments that are years away from any marketable product?

    It's an honest question, I've never seen any real physical quantum computers and nobody I know has ever seen one either. I am skeptical, but ready to be enlightened if anybody's got some real-world quantum computers out the

  • In other news... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Angst Badger (8636) on Wednesday August 22 2007, @09:58AM (#20318429)
    ...3D Realms has announced that Duke Nukem Forever will require installation of quantum RAM.
  • Last year it was "nanotech", this year, it's "Quantum computing".

    Like nanotech, QC still has many high theoretical and practical hurdles before the very first Nanite or quantum gate makes it to market. Lots of wild theorizing, but darn little actual hardware.

    In particular, a quantum gate or quantum computer is only capable of probabilistic answers. That is, each gate only has a slight predisposition to give the right answer. How you'd use unreliable gates to do say a 32-bit address decode is a bit of

    • Re:YAUQA: Yet another uninformed Quantum Article (Score:5, Interesting)

      by kebes (861706) on Wednesday August 22 2007, @10:55AM (#20319129) Journal

      a quantum gate or quantum computer is only capable of probabilistic answers
      I don't think that's true. Yes, many quantum processes are fundamentally probabilistic, but that just means we need to avoid those processes when building quantum computers. The intended design for a quantum computer is to use unitary (invertible, deterministic, etc.) operations for the quantum gates.

      The main roadblock to keeping the gates unitary (i.e. keep the error rate low) is to have the switching occur faster than the decoherence time (the timescale over which the delicate superposition decoheres into a random probabilistic mixture). This is certainly a difficult issue to solve, but in principle it is possible. The small-scale quantum computers that have been built to date were able to solve small problems deterministically.

      As a practical point, it may turn out to be very difficult to build a quantum computer... but as far as I know the intended designs of quantum computers are not to yield probabilistic answers and then to average them, but to maintain coherence long enough that the final answer is deterministic, with an acceptably small error rate.
  • This physicist sounds like he should start a dot.com company!
  • Whats next? Quantum Hard Drives?

  • Quntum bits and linking, fun consequences... (Score:3, Informative)

    by BlueParrot (965239) on Wednesday August 22 2007, @10:33AM (#20318893)
    A theorem of quantum mechanics is that you can't perfectly copy a quantum state as that would allow you to measure the energy of one copy and the time of the other, thus violating the uncertainty principle. In practise what happens is that the two systems become entangled so that a measurement on one of them will instantly disrupt the state of the other. Thus your quantum UNIX would have the 'ln' command but not 'cp' ( 'cp -l' is ok ). Even more amusing is that this mandates that the disruption is non-deterministic. If it wasn't you could use it to transmit information and energy quicker than the speed of light, which is prohibited by relativity. So, if you thought lawmakers had trouble understanding how computers work, just wait until they get to deal with the question of who is liable for causing the de-coherence of a quantum system ( hint: you can't prove it unless you caused it ). Bring on the lawyers :P

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by kebes (861706)

      Thus your quantum UNIX would have the 'ln' command but not 'cp' ( 'cp -l' is ok ).

      That's a cool way of thinking about it. However I think in a real implementation of a quantum computer, the system would be a mostly classical device (including CPU, RAM, hard drive), with a quantum chip as a co-processor that is used for certain computations only. The existence of the chip, and the quantum implications thereof, would probably be hidden from the user/programmer. So for instance the compiler would take care o

  • Patent it for step 3 profit!
  • User: My box seems to not want to boot, I think it's this new ram.
    Tech Help: Your ram may, or may not, be dead. We will not know until you open the box, at which point in time it will be decided.
    User: Thanks captain obvious.
  • Okay, so how fast is it? Is it faster than the current RAM we use, at the size we use it? I mean, this may SEEM like a dumb question, but my understanding is that reading the response from a "quantum query" is non-trivial. Does anyone know?
    • Even checking "Read Only" would irreversibly damage the contents

      Maybe this research is funded by Microsoft.

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