Will Quantum Computing Make It Out of the Lab? 129
alphadogg writes "Researchers have been working on quantum systems for more than a decade, in the hopes of developing super-tiny, super-powerful computers. And while there is still plenty of excitement surrounding quantum computing, significant roadblocks are causing some to question whether quantum computing will ever make it out of the lab. 'Artur Ekert, professor of Quantum Physics, Mathematical Institute at the University of Oxford, says physicists today can only control a handful of quantum bits, which is adequate for quantum communication and quantum cryptography, but nothing more. He notes that it will take a few more domesticated qubits to produce quantum repeaters and quantum memories, and even more to protect and correct quantum data. "Add still a few more qubits, and we should be able to run quantum simulations of some quantum phenomena and so forth. But when this process arrives to 'a practical quantum computer' is very much a question of defining what 'a practical quantum computer' really is. The best outcome of our research in this field would be to discover that we cannot build a quantum computer for some very fundamental reason, then maybe we would learn something new and something profound about the laws of nature," Ekert says.'"
Lets ask (Score:1)
*Shakes the magic 8-electron*
Reply hazy, try again
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*Shakes the magic 8-electron*
Outcome uncertain, try again
Would've been first post (Score:2, Funny)
With just a few more qubits, I could have entangled first post.
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What's with those qubits, anyway? Wasn't Noah's ark so many qubits long, so many qubits wide, and some amount of qubits high? WTF? If the quantum computer people are going blblical on us, we may NEVER see a working computer! After all these years, no one is quite certain what the hell a qubit was in the Bible. How are they gonna know what a qubit is inside a computer?
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source?
schizophrenia
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Paranoia
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And the world STILL sucks. We do not live under an uber-American world totality where we all sing the National Anthem at breakfast and those of the wrong skin color, temperament, or with irritable bowel syndrome have been quietly taken out back and shot.
Fat lot of good that super-secret quantum supercomputer in the hands of a secretive US government agency did
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Well, the problem with the NSA's super-secret quantum computer is that they can't tell other agencies the result of decrypting any message unless they can think of some plausible way of decrypting it without needing a quantum computer. If they did, the world would know that they had a quantum computer and that RSA and related algorithms were totally compromised, and they'd switch to using something else.
Well, maybe not, but the same situation did occur in the second world war - Churchill didn't allow civ
Eventually (Score:1)
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I agree. Though I expect that quantum computers will end up being cost prohibitive to the average consumer. What will end being in consumer electronics is some variant of optical processing.
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Re:High Frequency Trading (Score:4, Funny)
When high frequency trading finds a way to use this to make more money, you better believe they will make it work.
That'll be fun. You won't even know whether you own a stock until you open the box and look.
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Yep, I remember that, like yesterday. The catch-phrase was something like "To big to fail".
That's just life (Score:2)
Quantum Computing isn't going to work immediately, it's just life. It's going to make small progressions over time. Eventually there will be advancements that will make them practical for a given purpose. They will follow something like a "Moore's Law" of Quantum computing. Then some intelligent person will utter "I think there is a world market for maybe five Quantum computers"!!!
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Details of the current state (Score:5, Informative)
The current state of the field is advancing. The real problem as discussed in TFA is scaling quantum computers in a useful way that can still do error correction. Shore's algorithm which allows you to quickly factor numbers using a quantum computer requires on the order of n qbits to factor an n bit number. So if one wants to factor say a 300 digit number used in some public key crypto system you would need to control around 300 qbits. The technology for that is clearly very far. There's been recent work using superconducting systems and using quantum dots for qbits both of which look more promising than previous systems. (The first experiments were done with NMR systems which are clearly not very scalable).
From a strictly theoretical compsci perspective, the set of things it seems that quantum computers can do seems to be growing larger. Recent work by Scott Aaronson and others suggest that BQP (the set of problems which can be easily solved by a quantum computer with a low probability of error) may not lie in the polynomial hierarchy at all. http://arxiv.org/abs/0910.4698 [arxiv.org]. This is a much stronger claim then the claim that BQP doesn't lie in NP. This raises the hope that there may be some problems thought of as extremely difficult that lie in NP. However, trying to actually prove any strong results at this point is likely going to be really tough. At this point although many suspect that BPP (the classical analog of BQP) is equal to P, at this point we can't even prove that BPP lies in NP. In many ways theoretical comp sci is still very much in its infancy.
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Thats 300 logical qubits. It may require many more physical qubits.
Will Quantum Computing Make It Out of the Lab? (Score:2, Redundant)
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And, possibly, maybe and maybe not.
Netscraft Confirms It (Score:2)
Quantum computing was dying, or it wasn't. Then Netcraft confirmed it and collapsed the state to dead.
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|Ï(x)|^2
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If it does, my cats want to buy one, so they can determine whether I've woken up in the morning to feed them. The door to my bedroom is shut at night, so for them, until I open the door I am in a state of indeterminate wakefulness.
(Ok, I'm in a superposition of awake and asleep at other times, too...)
I suspect it will work (Score:5, Informative)
1) We have built qbits
2) We have entangled qbits
3) We have implemented the CNOT which is the universal gate for quantum computing (similar to NAND/NOR universal gates in classical computing)
The question is scaling up number of qbits, increasing coherence times (and possibly using coding solutions to reduce decoherence problems).
We have a number of quantum algorithms [wikipedia.org] waiting to be implemented, and even have quantum programming languages [wikipedia.org] that you can run simulations on at home today. And there is even a LinkedIn Group [linkedin.com] on quantum information science.
But I must admit that it could end up like fusion. We have all the basic theoretical knowledge of how to do fusion, and we can do a bit of fusion in the lab, what we lack is the engineering knowledge to achieve enough fusion on a large enough scale to make it practical.
Re:I suspect it will work (Score:4, Insightful)
First of all, I must disclose that I cannot speak authoritatively on this. While I know quantum mechanics and nuclear physics, I have never studied the problem of quantum computing. Therefore, take my opinion here on this topic with a grain of salt.
But I must confess that intuitively, it seems improbable. There is no "free lunch". Computing is a process of creating information. There is no shortcut for that. The primary challenge with quantum computing seems to be about maintaining adequate coherence, and I suspect that that maintaining coherence throughout a calculation will be equivalent in some manner to performing the calculation in a linear manner. But time will tell.
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I suspect that that maintaining coherence throughout a calculation will be equivalent in some manner to performing the calculation in a linear manner. But time will tell.
As designed by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation...all of the fatal flaws are perfectly masked by the superficial flaws?
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Perhaps! LOL
But once again, I don't want to assert this with any certainty. Just food for thought. Perhaps I am wrong.
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(I'm not a physicist, but I have studied some quantum computing.)
Even though I suspect it's wise to listen to a physicist's intuition on these matters, I think your intuition might have been clouded by the hype surrounding quantum computers. The truth is that there's really no free lunch. Nobody (outside the media) claims that quantum computers instantly solve all kinds of problems.
Think of it this way: some things in quantum mechanics are very hard to simulate using classical computers (it's much harder th
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Quantum computing is adiabatic computing [arxiv.org]. I.e. fully reversible without entropy increase. Hence a complex quantum computation is theoretically not an my more energy intensive then a simple one. Entropy only increases at the end when the final measurement is performed.
What makes the process tricky is keeping quantum coherence over the length of the algorithm.
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Yes, and the quantum theory being wrong so you can't possibly make a quantum computer is unlikely. I don't say current physic theories are complete and faultless (they aren't) but any better theory would have to explain experiments already done, including most of quantum non-intuitive stuff used in quantum computing.
People often understand (because they are told so) that quantum physics applies only at small scale, and not at bigger one. Actually quantum physics works at all scales, and theory of decoherenc
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To some extent, I suspect that quantum computing might well end up with the same problem that quantum mechanics is facing now: it works awesomely great on a very, very small scale, but cannot be used to explain the large scale force of gravity. Similarly, quantum computing might very well work with a few dozen to hundred qbits, but will fall apart at a larger scale where the number of error correcting mechanisms required to overcome decoherence will be too much.
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But I must admit that it could end up like fusion. We have all the basic theoretical knowledge of how to do fusion, and we can do a bit of fusion in the lab, what we lack is the engineering knowledge to achieve enough fusion on a large enough scale to make it practical.
It could also be, that we don't lack just the engineering knowledge, we lack the universe with suitable physical laws... But hopefully not.
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I remember Feynman wrote some about quantum computing. He always seemed positive on the idea, and I'm inclined to believe him. (That also ends my claimed background on all things quantum computing. From hereon I'm speculating, so there's no sense in flaming a dreamer - for those who might.)
A quantum computer, though, isn't a fusion reactor. The end goals for both systems are different. In a sense, the requirement that a fusion reactor eventually sustain itself (as it were) is something a quantum computer ne
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I remember Feynman wrote some about quantum computing. -- Yeah, see, e.g., here: http://www.phy.mtu.edu/~sgowtham/PH4390/Week_02/IJTP_v21_p467_y1982.pdf [mtu.edu]
Some people say that he coined the term "Quantum computer", others say that he popularized it, and it was originally due to David Deutsch. And of course it was influenced by Fredkin and Toffoli, and others asking about energy requirements for computation. And THAT goes back to von Neumann!
Now, von Neumann gave us not only classical computer view, currently
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But I must admit that it could end up like fusion.
At least for fusion, we know that it should be possible both in theory and practice (just look at the Sun for proof).
Just look at the numbers! (Score:3)
There has been an exponential increase [quantenblog.net] in the number of qubits under control since the first serious experiments started almost two decades ago. If the current trend continues, we will have usable quantum computers between 2020 and 2023.
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The real issue is whether it's costs can be brought down and whether it can scale. Quantum computing may stay too expensive for anyone outside of governments and corporations doing serious scientific research. The idea that just because you have quantum bits on one scale, that this scale will continue up as systems get larger is the flaw. You may get scalability but might hit a cost wall. BTW we still don't have flying cars. I use flying cars as an example of drawing a conclusion about the cost of tech
Will Quantum Computing make it out of the lab? (Score:2)
It is a superposition of skates.
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Google: partner with everyone, sue no one.
Apple: partner with no one, sue everyone.
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The answer is both Yes and No.
I know the answer...
...I looked.
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Now you'll never know its momemtum...
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Now you'll never know its momemtum...
Damn, now we'll be stuck at this stage of development forever!
Let's not forget... (Score:5, Informative)
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the history of the PC. How many decades did it take for us to get where we are? The first PC was some 50 years in the making and by today's standards was downright laughable in its capabilities. The first computers weren't Von Neumann machines either. You had to have a team of dedicated operators reconfigure patch cables between between outputs and inputs for each an every calculation! To be so pessimistic so early in the life of quantum computing is insulting to the progress we've made so far which is considerably outstripping the pace of development of the modern computer.
My pessimism is driven by a firm belief there is no free lunch in the universe. There is no perpetual motion. There is no well of infinite computation.
If you think your going to be able to answer questions requiring classic processors having the mass of the sun with a QC having many thousands of entangled qbits in a single coherent system I *believe* this is fantasy.
If your bar is much much lower.. say cost effective QC on desktops which add 1k, 1m or a billion times performance for some classes of proble
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Just because it's hyped doesn't mean that it's not real. Granted it's highly unlikely that we'll get unlimited computational power, but that's hardly reason to believe that quantum computing won't ever happen. Keep in mind that if you asked somebody working in a computer lab back in the 60s or even 80s, what we have now would likely be met with a lot of skepticism as well.
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Actually there was an issue of Communications of the ACM on the 25th anniversary of ENIAC (about 1971) that predicted mid 90's microprocessors quite accurately. An IBM 7094 in a wristwatch is the phrase I recall, the brand might be wrong.
Nobody knew what would happen with components, but the outlines of Moore's law were visible even then.
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I'm not sure what you were expecting quantum computers to be able to do. There's a lot of media hype which is made worse by people who just don't understand stuff. For example, there's no known way to solve any NP complete problem in polynomial time on a quantum computer. Similarly, while quantum computers can break many public key crypto systems (such as those based on the difficulty of factoring large numbers or on the closely connected problem of the discrete log), they can't break every public key cryptosystem. Quantum computers aren't magic and the people working with them haven't said otherwise.
I'm expecting computational power to scale to the exponent of the number of entangled qbits. Further I expect the number of qbits in the system to run well into the thousands.
Without the above you will never see a single code of any consequence broken on a QC.
2^1000 is a number with more than 300 digits and most certainly qualifies as magic to me.
There is simply not enough matter on earth available to build a powerful enough computer based on any other known principal.
In my mind arbitrary scaling of n^qbit
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2^1000 is a number with more than 300 digits and most certainly qualifies as magic to me.
And? You don't need 2^1000 qubits (or bits) to deal with 1000-binary-digit numbers. You need 1000. Your computer right now can easily handle such numbers.
There is simply not enough matter on earth available to build a powerful enough computer based on any other known principal.
Powerful enough to do what? Factor 1000 bit numbers? Well that's a problem with classical computers. Not an inherent principle of the universe, because the universe doesn't operate on classical principles.
In my mind arbitrary scaling of n^qbits is in the same category as denying the conservation of energy. I don't believe in something for nothing. I reject the idea it is possible to extract ungodly amounts of computation from the universe simply because it smacks of something for nothing.
"Arbitrary" as in unending, no, but there's little reason to think they couldn't be scaled exponentially for as long as we've done the same with tr
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Your stance is motivated by nothing other than a myopic view of scientific advance. Most of what we have today would look like a ridiculous 'free lunch' to people living 100 or 150 years ago, particularly in computing. But you are taking it for granted because you don't really internalize that you're already living with countless free lunches.
"Nothing other than a myopic view" is a little harsh considering there are only 10^80 atoms in the universe. A 1000 qbit system would perform vastly more classic operations in one single coherent transaction than there are atoms in the entire observable universe.
There is incremental advancement and then there is absolute lunacy.
I could use your reasoning in response to someone doubting the viability of perpetual motion machines or to poopoo shannon and nyquisy.
Nobody knows everything - at any time anything
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That was more or less my thought, I mean quantum computing is probably a lot further along than when Babbage came up with his difference engine idea. And it wasn't until a century or so after his death that computers finally made their way out of the lab and started winding up in living rooms on a regular basis.
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PC's are not mainframes, 50 years? some guys in the 70's wanted a computer, half decade later it was already an industry ... I think your skewing this a little too hard
Of course it will. Or not. (Score:2)
Depends on the flavor of cat.
It is not so much of "will it" as opposed to "when will it." And to what degree of success & usefulness. I'll give the timeline roughly around the same time as fusion.
Two Qubits... (Score:2)
Two qubits should be enough for anyone.
Oh c'mon, somebody had to say it. Might as well save some budding tech CEO from being cursed with that quote for all time.
CD, DVD, Blu-Ray (Score:2)
Too late, it already did... (Score:1)
Lockheed-Martin already bought one. It's made by D-Wave Systems and is called the D-Wave One. It is known as the first commercial quantum super computer. It has 128 qbits and has been out for about a year already.
what 'a practical quantum computer' really is (Score:2)
It has to be able to run Doom. And Barney Doom.
And, obviously, Linux. OpenBSD would be the Big Win.
Quantum Computing (Score:3)
For instance, encryption is highly related to compression. I believe that a quantum computer would be highly efficient at compressing and decompressing data... which is a task CPUs (and GPUs) do a lot.
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In other words, a four-qubit computer may be nearly useless except for very specific problems; but if it was part of your desktop computer, it would give it a large boost in all sorts of power.
Not really; a four-qubit quantum computer can be simulated very fast in today's computers. It would be completely useless for any practical purpose (unless quantum computer fabrication technology improvements become ridiculously better than improvements on classical computer fabrication technology for an extended period of time).
To simulate the evolution of an n-qubit quantum computer all you have to do is (essentially) multiply a vector of size 2^n by a series of 2^n-by-2^n matrices whose entries are compl
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Yes, except for the final step, which is trivial (and also fast) to simulate but a little harder to explain: you have to "make a measurement", which can be simulated simply as choosing randomly one of the 2^n components of the vector, according to probabilities that depend on the values of each component. The relative probability of each component can be calculated as the square of the absolute value the component (remember, these are complex numbers).
So, quantum algorithms have to be designed so that in th
can it run crisis 2 at full speed with at least 60 (Score:2)
can it run crisis 2 at full speed with at least 60fps at full detail?
Will require a shift in thinking (Score:2)
I imagine quantum computers will be possible, but only after a fundamental change in how we think about and design things. Sort of like how future technology was imagined in the 30's and 40's. It took the invention of the transistor and other solid state devices to get people to re-think how things could be designed.
In a word. (Score:2)
No.
Quantum Summary (Score:2)
The quantum summary quantumly mentions many quantum uses of the word quantum.
And for some filler, maybe they'll make a quantum grill to quantum barbecue quantum burgers and quantum hot dogs.
In Soviet Russia (Score:1)
We struggle to keep quantum computer IN lab!
Oh! Oh! I know.... (Score:2)
You can't build a quantum computer here because we're a simulation already running in another quantum computer and there isn't enough resolution in the simulation's space time manifold to support the necessary function of another quantum computer. Duh!
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Just like how I cannot run a copy of windows on my windows computer....
Oh wait...
VirtualBox
Maybe we can run quantum computers but they will run very crappily and have the potential to crash the universe.....
Chalk!!! (Score:1)
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The Oak Ridge Boys (not the band) invented a power source of the future for the whole world inthe late 60's / early 70's but the DOE had a vested interest in making bombs instead and since this new tech would eat bomb parts as fuel they were dismissed and ignored because they were so "heavily vested in current tech" which was ironically invented by the same guy who came up with the new tech.....
Such is the ways of foolish government agencies and the companies that lobby them.
neutrinos (Score:2)
I, for one, am putting my bets on neutrino computing.
Using neutrinos faster than the speed of light, it will be possible to send messages back in time, thereby enabling any kind of brute force algorithm. Just do a brute force search, and instantly receive a message from the future containing the answer to your problem.
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This will break even passwords that only allow one try as you send a msg back in time that AAAAAAAAA didn't work , try somethign else. You will always get the correct answer back.
Announcement will be delayed by many years. (Score:1)
Because of the impact of Q.C. on crypto systems, I think it unlikely that the announcement will rapidly follow a real practical breakthrough development. Unless there is a very strong willed stinker on the development team, who can resist the bribes and threats, the policy is going to be to keep it under wraps as long as possible. The news will throw the financial community into a panic as no electronic encryption or signature systems will be considered reliable. There is too much money at risk for a prod
As a former QC researcher: (Score:4, Informative)
Yes. it will. the time frame for QC leaving the lab is something from 15 years to 50years. If it doesn't work in the next 50years it means we understand something about quantum mechanics significantly wrong (or we figured QC is useless for some reason).
There are several milestones:
1) implementing single qubits (done in many systems) and high fidelity readout (done on a few systems)
2) high fidelity operations on single qubits (done on some systems)
3) controllable coupling of qubits (done on some systems) witn good on-off ratio (done on a few systems) in a decent architecture (only very few experiments AFAIU) with a demonstration of simple QIP algorithms (done)
4) scalability in the production yield for solid state systems (NOT done, by far not) or in the resource usage for other systems (atom chips are promising)
5) Quantum media conversion between solid state and optics (done) with decent fidelity (far, far away) for using QIP in Quantum communication as local processors
6) Error correcting schemes to lower the threshold for 2) to a doable value for building a scalable computer (that is, a computer which gains computational power when ressources are added): theroretical (done) and experimental (far away)
7) Theoretical understanding of QIP Architecture (not done)
6, which implies 1-4 (and depending on the scheme also 5) have been solved is the criterion for building an arbitrary powerful QC for arbitrary money. The more you exceed the absolute thresholds imposed onto 2) and 4) the more power you will gain by adding resources (it could be 10 or 10000 physical qubits needed for 1 logical qubit). The question is: when will it be economical to build it? I cant answer this, but the first thing where it may pay off is for protein folding simulations. We are looking at replacing a 100MW input power classical computer by a some MW input power quantum computer (condensing helium). We may look at power cost savings of 10 to 100million of dollars per year runtime of the QC. Currently the schemes which are predicted to scale with current HW (on the rather optimistic end, i.e. the best experiments ever done) may require roughly a 100Million - 1billion Dollar investment into Hardware alone per QC (hand waving approximation), obviously unacceptable. However if the price goes down by a facto of 10 to 100 (which could happen in the next 20 years if better material or schemes are found), then it would be economical.
An interesting question! (Score:1)
how will they... (Score:1)
It scales badly (Score:2)
I don't believe it will. Quantum bits just don't scale as well as normal bits, because they must be entangled. That's the problem.
If I have a working n (normal) bits, it's quite easy to make 2*n bits (just produce the same thing twice and add some circuitry). But with quantum bits, if you have n qubits working, even n+1 qubits is an engineering challenge and 2*n qubits is a major research effort.
And because it scales so badly, it won't become practical. So, your quantum computer broke the crypto on 300 bits
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We're talking internet right here. The problem faced with long-distance quantum stuff is that the bigger the lenght of the channel, the higher the probability of error.
So how do you implement this? You make a shitload of entangled particle pairs in such a way that it works like an error-correction-protocol (computers, hmkey? They proces, duh) and then send the result by means of more entagled particle pairs to the next repeater, or until the package has reached its destination.
You could have Googled that, y
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that's not a quantum system... that's what the internet is now.
No shit, Sherlock. But it's not quantum based. How else do you want to make a fully working quantum computer, if you can't have a quantum based network 'card'?
PS: Google starting English sentences with capitals...
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Uh. Don't feed the trolls. This guy is one of the more obvious ones.
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RE: quantum thinking (Score:1)
Does anyone remember the Quantum hard drive company? What was in them hard drives?
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I'll try to answer this, even though it's a little late, and I don't know if you'll ever read this. Be warned that I'm not a physicist -- but I've studied quite a bit of quantum computing, and I asked the same kinds of questions you're asking.
The thing is, a superposition of 2 states (or actually any finite number of states) is not really that interesting or weird, unless you're also talking about entanglement. Unfortunately, quantum computers really need entanglement to work. [Note that when you're talking