IBM Touts Quantum Computing Breakthrough 132
Lucas123 writes "IBM today claimed to have been able to reduce error rates and retain the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits or qubits long enough to perform a gate operation, opening the door to new microfabrication techniques that allow engineers to begin designing a quantum computer. While still a long ways off, the creation of a quantum computer would mean data processing power would be exponentially increased over what is possible with today's silicon-based computing."
This does _not_ imply scalability! (Score:5, Interesting)
For conventional computers, as soon as you have "and" and "not" in gate-form, you can do everything, as you can just connect them together. For quantum computers that is not true, as all elements performing the complete computation need to be entangled the whole time.
IMO, there is now reason to believe that the real-world scalability of quantum computers is so bad that it negates any speed advantage. It seems the complexity of building a quantum computer that can do computations on inputs of size n is at least high-order polynomial or maybe exponential in n. That would explain why no significant advances have been made in keeping larger quantum computing elements entangled in the last 10 years or so and no meaningful sizes have been reached.
Keep in mind that, for example, to break RSA 2048, you have to keep > 2048 bits entangled while doing computations on them. And you cannot take smaller elements and combine them, the whole > 2048 bits need to represent the input all must be entangled with each other or the computation does not work.
Re:And people say .... (Score:1, Interesting)
That was the commercial I remember for several years.
Its not always about making cutting edge front page news break throughs, sometimes its just about refining something until its just right after someone else made the break through and then forgot about it because they moved on to the next shiny thing.
Both kinds of people/businesses are useful and needed, well atleast until this utopian dream you have becomes reality and everyone works for the common good anyway.
Re:And people say .... (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple doesn't do technological research. Instead, they pour all of that money into usage research, so that they can design an improved user experience.
It's not necessarily a bad thing. There's a place for both the technological side, and the usability side. Most tech companies focus on the technology side while neglecting the usability, which is why so much technology ends up unusable by laymen.
Microsoft actually does a lot of usability research too. But the difference between Microsoft and Apple is that Apple has (or had) someone steering the ship. They're a top-down dictatorship-style management house. Microsoft is more about internal competition to see who wins out. They're more of a survival-of-the-fittest, cream-of-the-crop-rises-to-the-top type of management house.