Separating Hope From Hype In Quantum Computing 109
pgptag writes "This talk by Dr. Suzanne Gilbert (video) explains why quantum computers are useful, and also dispels some of the myths about what they can and cannot do. It addresses some of the practical ways in which we can build quantum computers and gives realistic timescales for how far away commercially useful systems might be."
Post with unknown state (Score:5, Funny)
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The direct link appears:
http://blip.tv/file/get/Telexlr8-vbSuzanneGildertOnQuantumComputingInTeleplaceSeptember4640.flv
question: (Score:2)
Would this sort of thing ever become useful for personal use? Or is Quantum Computing strictly a commercial endeavor?
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It appears that the moderators don't know any history. You're obviously making a joke based on the observation in the early 1950s that "the worldwide market for computers is about ten." It's funny now, but then computers weren't very useful for anybody without huge number crunching and database needs and multi-million dollar budgets. At the time, a computer took an entire building to house, and a whole lot of personnel to operate. The most powerful computer in existance was less powerful than a singing Hallmark card.
So the joke's on the mods, who actualy believe it. Of course, right now the worldwide market is zero, since they haven't actually constructed one yet. If and when they accomplish the feat, it's possible that in the future all compuers will be quantum computers. I doubt I'll live long enough to see it (I'm not young any more). [kuro5hin.org]
That link will give the mods a little computer history if they're interested.
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You've got to give these things times, my man. This is Slashdot. Just an hour after your post (and about an hour and 40 minutes after the original) it is up to +5, Funny where it belongs.
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It was a +4 insightful when I made the post; it's now +5 funny, 50% insightful and 50% funny according to the "score" link.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
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Geez, thanks for ruining a good meme with facts. Next thing you know we'll find out all those cats have been misquoted time and time again.
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Geez, thanks for ruining a good meme with facts. Next thing you know we'll find out all those cats have been misquoted time and time again.
Or that Lemmings don't commit mass suicide [snopes.com], or that virtually all cartographers knew the world was round throughout the dark ages, or that glass isn't a liquid, yeah I've been noticing lots of this lately xD
I'm beginning to waft back to the old maxim: "It's not true unless it's boring"
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Thank you for the correction. The wiki article is interesting, this line "All these early quotes are questioned by Eric Weiss, an Editor of the Annals of the History of Computing in ACS letters in 1985" caught my eye - Harry Houdini's [wikipedia.org] real nane was Eric Weiss, according to biographies I've read, although wikipedia says "Harry Houdini was born as Erik Ivan Weisz (he would later spell his birth name as Ehrich Weiss)". It's magic!
As you say, Watson didn't say it, but from the wiki article:
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I have an offtopic question. Eniac is your contemporary, and it was used to do a bunch of numerical calculations. How did it compare to what Feynman and technologically-apt teenagers under his direction did for Project Manhattan? Does anyone know a rough order of magnitude of multiplies-and-adds that both projects had to go through, and the time it took? IIRC, Feynman's boys have figured out pretty much every basic contemporary CPU/GPU design trick (pipelining, interleaving/scheduling, speculative execution
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Of course, right now the worldwide market is zero, since they haven't actually constructed one yet.
Except that in the video she clearly talks about several quantum computers that have been built and have actually solved problems.
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That link starts out with "ENIAC, the first electronic programmable computer", and goes downhill from there. Sure, let's forget Colossus Mark I and II.
The rest of the article is a jump between family anecdotes and quite limited personal experiences that I do not think "will give the mods a little computer history". Where are TI, Fairchild and Motorola? Or HP? Were the DEC PDPs not worth mentioning? Didn't anything happen between 1974 and 1982 that deserved more than a single combined sentence? To me,
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It's a little computer history, not an exhaustive history. Note the title is "Growing up with computers"; it's a personal chronicle to give a little insight to younger folks.
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Colossus was secret until long after the fact. And I haven't reread that piece in years (I'd rather read other people's writing, I can't learn from my own), but didn't I mention that the first computer I bought was the TS-1000, designed by Clive Sinclair, a Brit?
Of course a first person chronicle written by an American will have an American bias, just as a first person chronicle written by an Austrilain will have an Australian bias.
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Actually, based on TFA, I'd say we're more likely to see a multi-core processor with some quantum and some classic cores. Kind of like the old floating point co-processors, or going back still further, the TI-99/4A architecture which was made up of a CPU with dedicated video, audio, and peripheral co-processors.
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Actually, based on TFA, I'd say we're more likely to see a multi-core processor with some quantum and some classic cores. Kind of like the old floating point co-processors, or going back still further, the TI-99/4A architecture which was made up of a CPU with dedicated video, audio, and peripheral co-processors.
Yis, because Parsec with Speech Synthesis wasn't enough, now it's going Quantum. 8D
Perhaps (Score:3, Funny)
Maybe in the future, a Quantum Computer running Windows x.x will be able to harness its power to show the contents of a folder in less than the 30 seconds it takes now.
Re:Perhaps (Score:4, Funny)
I'm not a quantum physics expert and I don't play one on television
And if I did, the show would have been canceled.
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I know windows 2.0 was a while back, but the good news is that they're finally going to get this bug fixed for Windows 8.
Re:Perhaps (Score:5, Funny)
If you'd categorized your porn collection properly, it wouldn't need to all be in one folder :-(
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It takes less than 30 seconds now, for those of us running on hardware more advance than an 80286
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Here we are having fun and you have to go throw your superior hardware in our face.
I bet you're real fun at parties.
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It takes less than 30 seconds now, for those of us running on hardware more advance than an 80286
It takes more then 30 seconds for a 486 to index a TB of porn... And thats even with turbo
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Yeah, but I solved that by removing all the porn from my computer at work.
You mean like.. (Score:1)
"I hope this thing is really fast running my Beowulf cluster" or "oh man, these things will run a Beowulf cluster 10000x faster than today's machines! "
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You obviously don't know what a Beowulf cluster is.
The joke is "imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!" for a reason.
The quantum computers wouldn't run your Beowulf cluster, they would be your Beowulf cluster.
And the first ones will probably be slow as shit anyway (but catch up much faster than current tech).
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Unless you're running a Beowulf cluster emulator on them, of course.
Oops...thought this was about Obama (Score:3, Funny)
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Nah, it's about Fox News. By balancing out mostly truth with mostly fiction, their audience doesn't know the exact state of the union. Because they don't know, they don't languish into depression and become unproductive. However, given their politics, if they did become unproductive there, we would be better off and more productive overall. It doesn't bother me since on a long enough timeline, everything collapses into one state.
Video? (Score:1, Funny)
What video? There's no video on that page, only a huge blank gap sponsored by Adobe.
Re:Video? (Score:4, Funny)
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Let's assume that you're correct that Flash would use up 80% of your CPU. What else are you planning on doing while you're watching a 2-hour+ video on quantum computing and quantum mechanics? I mean, okay, you could compile code with those clock cycles, I suppose, but other than some automated task (which will still putter along while you watch the video, by the way), what would you need the CPU for in the meantime? I highly doubt you'd get anything out of the video if you tried to play Call of Duty 4 in
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It's well worth watching, considering that this is the future and the summary is comprehensive and all. However, the basic upshot is:
* some myths have built up around quantum computing, such as that classical crypto will be made obsolete. [ I'm not sure what her point was here; she seems to dismiss most these, but then never really goes back to it. Her other details seem to support these "myths" more than debunk them ]
* quantum computers fit reality better than classical computers, therefore we need them
Who is going to watch this? (Score:5, Insightful)
This is begging for an "executive summary" from anyone who has time to watch it, if there is such a person.
Re:Who is going to watch this? (Score:5, Informative)
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Allow me to expand on the complexity theory parts (Score:2)
The most common such belief seems to be the belief that a quantum computer can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time.
Allow me to expand a bit on that.
There's a complexity class known as BQP which is defined to be what quantum computers can do in polynomial time (hence the Q and P; the B is for Bounded error probability, i.e. algorithms succeed with probability at least 2/3; if you want better: repeat and take majority voting).
It is known that BQP contains P and BPP (randomized poly-time turing machines), and is contained within PSPACE (which contains NP).
It is conjectured that P != NP and that BQP contains some but not al
Summarizing... (Score:1)
Quantum computers are useful for the following class of problem:
1. The only way to solve it is to guess answers repeatedly and check them,
2. There are n possible answers to check,
3. Every possible answer takes the same amount of time to check, and
4. There are no clues about which answers might be better: generating possibilities randomly is just as good as checking them in some special order.
If your problem doesn't look
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That is obviously not the only thing it can do. In P time it can solve P problem (much like a classical computer, but potentially using $\sqrt{classical}$ time, if it meets the above requirements. You can use quantum computing to find (with any probability of your choice which is less than one) the solution to a BPP problem in P time, which is again just like classical computers. Something new here is the ability to solve BQP problems (with any chosen probality less than one) in P time.
That last one is the
Re:Who is going to watch this? (Score:5, Insightful)
I just want to know what exactly is added to this presentation by using an avatar on a virtual stage.
People want to bash powerpoint but someone takes up half the video area with superfluous (and bad) VR and no one minds?
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You're not on Twitter.
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It makes it a video. And videos are cool.
Re:Who is going to watch this? (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed; is there a printed transcript anywhere? I can read a lot faster than I can listen, with a lot better comprehension.
Re:Who is going to watch this? (Score:4, Informative)
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As long as nobody watches it, we can't really say for certain what's in it.
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A quantum computer is a computer that uses at least one quantum effect to solve problems. Currently quantum computers are leveraging either superposition or entanglement. A difficult hurdle to scaling quantum computers is decohe
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Yeah. A cute, fresh-faced, geeky female doctor with glasses, summarising quantum computers in about an hour. Nah, no one here wants to watch that ;)
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Not only that, but whatever crappy player they're using doesn't seem to want to let you seek. No matter where you move the marker, the whole presentation just starts over from the beginning -- complete with the audience jabbering right over the speaker.
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Not only that, but whatever crappy player they're using doesn't seem to want to let you seek. No matter where you move the marker, the whole presentation just starts over from the beginning -- complete with the audience jabbering right over the speaker.
Go to the source http://telexlr8.blip.tv/file/4083093/ [telexlr8.blip.tv] open the Files and Links box in the right column and download the original .mp4 video file.
Schrodinger's laptop (Score:3, Funny)
She's a cutie (Score:2)
Irony? (Score:2, Informative)
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The real question is (Score:2)
The real question is if there's some significant use case not already covered by current methods, like RSA and AES for encryption. Sure quantum encryption have some nice theoretical properties, but most things are not 110% secure. You can still bribe people, extort people, plant spys, record passwords and so on. I doubt for almost any system that pure crypto is the weakest link in the chain anymore. Maybe, just maybe there's a quantum code cracking computer deep in the halls of the NSA but it won't be any o
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At some point this becomes truth...
http://www.xkcd.org/538/ [xkcd.org]
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I'd expect that the main use for quantum computers will be to simulate quantum systems.
Second Life Presentations suck (Score:3, Informative)
I was going to listen, but the dude yakking in the background totally oblivious (well..not totally oblivious as he questioned himself as to why he can hear himself talking) to the fact that his mic is broadcasting right over the speaker. Dumb.
W/O RTFA (Score:5, Informative)
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They're hypothetically faster in the case of quantum-quantum operations since they're analog with hypothetically infinite data density (where a binary bit stores a 0 or a 1, a qbit stores any value between 0 and 1). But without improved ways to interface with this, it's of fairly limited use. Nature simulates itself with perfect fidelity, which is not really of help to us unless we can find a reliable way to reduce the answer to something consistent and human-understandable.
It's true but potentially mislead
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Actually, it sucks big time.
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It's not very friendly to any other user either if you ask me.
(But the content of posts can be pretty high - as the GGP illustrates - and the moderator system usually works - somewhat. So we take the awkwardness of the editing system together with the advantages. Slashdot maintainers, that does not mean that we don't want a better editor, thank you very much.)
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http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1285849&cid=28520061 [slashdot.org]
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Yah, I did not rtfa either. But hey you might know something. So here is where I am coming from: where do you use a kinematic causality model vs a dynamic causality model? So there was a odd slashdot article recently on someone who built a quantum computer that was reliable enough to get some statistics on. So I guess he did a thousand runs. He got the right answer 60% of the time and something apparently random 40% of the time. If I think kinematics, I think machine. And I wonder, was the quantum co
It's great to hear a quantum physicist say... (Score:2)
"Why do I hear my voice?" during a video conference.
Makes me feel hella smart. :D
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"Why do I hear my voice?" during a video conference.
Makes me feel hella smart. :D
I was surprised to hear my voice during a video conference, because I was hot speaking! Somebody in the audience had started playing a video clip he had recorded a few minutes before.
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I think you are underestimating chess.
Yes it is solvable, but assuming one variation can be calculated in a single floating point operation (it probably can't, but who knows) with current tech (3 petaflop/s) it would take 10^97 years just to calculate the first move*. The next calculation is nearly as big as the first, with the calculations getting slightly smaller as the game goes on.
That means a computer that solves one chess move per year (for the first 10 moves or so, after that the calculations are a
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Oh not again (Score:3, Informative)
These crooks from D-Wave just won't give up. 128 qubits quantum computer!? pics or it didn't happen.
For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems [wikipedia.org]
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These crooks from D-Wave just won't give up. 128 qubits quantum computer!? pics or it didn't happen.
For more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D-Wave_Systems [wikipedia.org]
Picture in http://telexlr8.wordpress.com/2010/09/04/suzanne-gildert-on-quantum-computing-in-teleplace-september-4/ [wordpress.com] Watch the talk before saying crooks?
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Oh for fuck's sake. I didn't mean literal pictures; I mean peer-reviewed papers. The ones that they have in their website pale before the miracle that would be a 128-qubit quantum computer.
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You mean the 22 peer reviewed publications describing the processor in its entirety aren't enough?