Quantum Leap From Australian Research Promises Super-Fast Computing Power (theguardian.com) 68
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Simmons, a former Australian of the Year, and her team at the University of New South Wales announced in a paper published in Nature journal on Thursday that they have been able to achieve the first two-qubit gate between atom qubits in silicon, allowing them to communicate with each other at a 200 times faster rate than previously achieved at 0.8 nanoseconds. A two-qubit gate operates like a logic gate in traditional computing, and the team at UNSW was able to achieve the faster operation by putting the two atom qubits closer together than ever before -- just 13 nanometers -- and in real-time controllably observing and measuring their spin states. A scanning tunneling microscope was used to place the atoms in silicon after the optimal distance between the two qubits had been worked out. The research has been two decades in the making, after researchers in Australia opted to build a quantum computer on silicon material.
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All the idiots who think it has to do with CPU speed.
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To be fair, transistor density does certainly affect speed, since the time it takes for a signal to propagate on a shorter path will be less than what it takes for a longer one.
But yes, Moore's Law is about transistor density and only transistor density. There are other (usually much more significant) factors which will affect speed of computation beyond simply how small you make the transistors
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Technically for a program written to cater for more processors (multi threaded) it would also mean an increase in perceived performance, but it's depressing how many programs are still single threaded
About that spin state (Score:2, Interesting)
It's not actually the spin state, its the net effect of the electron and the detector.
Look, these different motions, spin, translation, oscillation and so on, they're all components of the same mechanism of motion. A sort of oscillatory waddle over the oscillating F field.
It isn't just the translational component that is affected by the motion of the detector (aka the redshift/doplar effect), all the other motions are too.
Suppose an electron is moving up and down, and you measure it with a detector whose el
How to prove this (Score:1)
Look, there's a way to prove that entanglement is really this effect.... you don't need the entanglement event for electrons to have the same properties. All you need to do is control other variables to be the same.
Heat is the big problem one, it's an oscillation away from the resonance point, and if you remove it, matter becomes very regular. Atoms oscillate according to their structure, i.e. the same type of atom oscillates the same way when driven by the same resonance field.
So take away the heat, and me
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No (Score:3)
No, a two-qubit gate does not promise or imply "Super-Fast Computing Power."
It is a minor improvement on a type of computer that is unlikely to provide significant computing power for decades or centuries.
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It is a minor improvement on a type of computer that is unlikely to provide significant computing power for decades or centuries.
Regardless of the difficulties, this isn't vaporware tech one can just handwave away. An intelligence agency with a functional quantum computer (I forget how many gates are needed, but IIRC it wasn't a very large number) can break RSA and Elliptic Curve at will.
So, uh, yeah, there are quite a few three letter agencies in the world that are keeping a very close eye on developments like these, and the moment they think they can build one for a couple billion dollars... I kinda suspect they will. If indeed
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This is just not true. With 259 "perfectly functioning" qubits, you can use most already existing implementations of Shor's algorithm to do this. 2n+3 is usually the number given as a practical choice. But if you want 2n+1, you should look at https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.07884 .
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Then you have the problem that as of yet even if they had those they don't know how to frame the algorithms as Qubit expressions.
That, I had not heard. Why doesn't Shor's algorithm work with qbits?
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Also worth noting we're not gonna find out if they ever do successfully build one. The value of it goes way down once its existence becomes known, since there are multiple feasible alternatives to ECC/RSA.
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All you show is that you grasp the scale of my argument when I say "centuries."
You don't present any counter-argument about why a small number of gates in a type of computer that reboots after every instruction is likely to outpace the computers with a proven ability to scale.
We did not fly horses to the moon, though, so you're a little bit off in finding a workable metaphor to compare regular computers and quantum computers.
It is more like, it's 75 years after the first steam engine, and somebody drew a pi
Many-worlds theory is really fun (Score:2)
So for example, we build a quantum computer with 8 qubits and t
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Also, GR/Quantum Physics
Re: Many-worlds theory is really fun (Score:2)
Actually, Occam's Razor favors simpler hypothesis, meaning hypothesis with fewer assumptions, over more complex ones for explaining something. It doesn't care about the now big the outcomes of that reduction in assumptions yields.
MWI is constructed by removing one assumption from the Copenhague interpretation, namely, that there must be some law of nature forcing the wave function to collapse down into a single state. This assumption isn't necessary for QM to work, removing it doesn't cause any damage. Ther
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The only problem with alternate universes is: there is no interaction with ours, hence the name, "alternate". So yes, you are totally wrong.
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Now, I could have that wrong
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But consider Santa Clause. If there are multiple universes, and each has a Santa, and each Santa hops in his sleigh Christmas Eve and takes presents the good kids in ‘n’ houses, and then Santa shifts to one of the other dimensions and delivers presents to the good kids ‘n’ times, and
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My understanding is that even if MWI is false and it's only wavefunction collapse going on, quantum computers would work the same way. From my understanding, the qubits function like a CPU register in that more qubits allows for operations to be performed on larger numbers. However, they also do operations, so they also function like a CPU core, so I guess a memristor CPU would be an apt comparison? I know they're trained for a specific purpose, like neural networks, but am unsure exactly how that's done.
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My understanding is that even if MWI is false and it's only wavefunction collapse going on, quantum computers would work the same way.
Oh, well, of course. The interpretation of QM doesn't affect the numbers; it only affects what the numbers imply. I just find it really cool to consider the concept that we're building a computer that interacts with itself in alternate universes, that "cooperates with itself" in order to solve a problem and therefore gains in power exponentially as we make it bigger. Imagine if you had a tough job you were trying to solve and you could borrow 10 copies of yourself from alternate universes to help out. It's
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So for example, we build a quantum computer with 8 qubits and that's 2^8 = 256 computers built in alternate universes that are essentially talking to each other, cooperating to perform the same calculation. And if you increase the number of qubits to 9, suddenly you have 512 computers talking to each other.
I think that it's selfish and wasteful to bring unimaginable numbers of extra universes into being for no other reason than to solve a little problem you want to figure out.
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Whenever you reach a non-expert audience with an expert topic in this fashion, it will. Too many people are Dunning-Kruger sufferers.
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Excellent! This way we can find out whether many-world has an upper limit on worlds, or at least whether it is more than 2^4096 or so! After all, that is pretty much the lower bound for useful attacks on RSA these days.
My link (Score:1)
Aha, a "Quantum Leap" (Score:1)
No, it does not (Score:1)
Quantum computers, if they ever work, will be exceptionally slow. There are just some types of very slow computations that they may be able to do less slow. They are basically unusable for anything else.