New Step Towards The Quantum Computer

Researchers at Delft University of Technology have succeeded in carrying out calculations with two quantum bits (qubits), the building blocks of a possible future quantum computer. For those of you who don't know, ordinary bits in a computer are representation of data. There are only two states of a bit: 1 and 0. If a coin was a bit then heads would be "1" and tails would be "0." Qubits states are both 1 and 0 at the same time. If that same coin was a qubit, then its states would be both heads and tails simultaneously. It's actually a superimposition of states. Once you measure the state then it collapses into one of the two states. Since the states are probabilities (80% chance the state is a 1) have to measure the state a couple of times to be sure it is 1. That's is how the quantum world works--not in exact values. What the researchers were able to do is to create a 'controlled-NOT' calculation using superconducting rings.

What does a quantum computer mean? It means much faster processing speeds than what is currently produced now. For instance, you have a database that has 100,000 unsorted data keys. You want to find a particular key. Potentially, with a standard computer you would have to search all 100,000 keys. With a quantum computer you would only have to search 316 (the square root of 100,000) keys! Think about that for a second. A quantum computer could potentially break any password and decipher any known standard encryption (unless you use quantum cryptography).

The upside to a quantum computer is that it can possibly simulate any complex system, such as the mind, social systems like the stock market, and weather systems like tornadoes, hurricanes, etc. In Seth Lloyd's 2006 book Programming The Universe: A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes On The Cosmos he claims a quantum computer's simulations would be virtually indistinguishable from real systems it is simulating. In other words it would be a universe in of itself. Actually, he thinks the universe itself might be a quantum computer. Something to ponder.