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D-Wave's appeal differs in that its computer will be able to solve much larger problems than companies are currently able to tackle, said Steve Jurvetson, a partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson and an investor in D-Wave. Many medical outfits actually limit the scope of their research to fit the existing computational abilities. D-Wave has 100 patent applications filed, and 35 have been granted.
However, how larger systems will behave remains unknown, Rose said. D-Wave has engineered its chip so that the qubits are insulated from noise and other factors, and he has confidence that the number of qubits can be increased, "but we could be wrong," he said.
Another distinct advantage that the computer will have comes in energy consumption. Niobium is a superconductor and, thus, does not radiate heat. The chip itself requires only a few nanowatts.
The refrigeration unit consumes the most power at 20 kilowatts, which is still small compared with most server farms. Expanding the number of qubits on the chip will not require massive increases of refrigeration, Rose added.
Even with the explanations, quantum concepts can be a little tough to digest. Rose reminded the audience that humans consist of atoms that first appeared in a supernova billions of years ago. Trying to understand those atomic interactions that lead up to the present is at the heart of quantum computing.
"When I went to school, they didn't teach quantum mechanics," Martin said. "Newton was my boy."
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In any case it's really the final frontier for local calculations or calculations that the human mind needs to understand. If we do go faster then light someday we will still use quantum through probably something like Quantum Tunneling but the results will still be the same "instant" to us. So this seems great like the final frontier. I hope we can put this into better hard practice as far as controlling atoms and teleportation safely and productively.
In the end you still have to calculate.
(NP problems, can now be solved instantaniously,as long as the answer can be posed in the form of the number of QBits available)
But, I've heard it enables another type of unbreakable encryption called quantum encryption.
See http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~jford/crypto.html for references on quantum encryption.
1) The key length is less than or equal to the number of QuBits, current 16, supposedly 512 to 1024 in the future
2) Correct software is actually written to make the Quantum computer crack the encryption scheme.
3) Someone who wants to crack can actually afford one of these computers and the cooling requirements necessary.
4) The key size does not continue to stay larger than the number of QuBits available in in the largest Quantum Computer.
;)
quantum computing efforts, so I know a little bit about it.
Indeed, quantum computing has been done and this company is
not the first to do it!
A number of qunatum computing research groups at various
university-related institutes have been able to do computing
using atoms --- but only on a very small, limited scale with a
small number of atoms.
Last I read, (in terms of validated scientific papers) scientists
have been able to contol as many as 12 q-bits, or quantum bits,
to do small-scale computations. That's equal to the power of an
early-stage computer that could manipulate one kilobyte of
information.
And graudally, they have trying to work on scaling up to more
qunatum bits, using more atoms, to get a useful quantum
computer.
But the challenge is that the atoms are VERY, VERY difficult to
contol ... the atoms are so extremely sensitive that it takes
massive amounts of equipment worth millions and millions of
dollars ... the cooling equipment and all of that, just to control
12 little atoms.
The more atoms you throw into the picture, the more difficult it
becomes to contol them and to get useful computing out of it.
You get problems like "decoherence" and uncertainity crops up
as well as errors, as you try to control more and more atoms.
These problems are not entirely insurmountable, I don't think ...
and all over the world there are brilliant minds working with
mega-millions of government research dollars trying to solve
these problems and scale up the quantum computer to get it to
do something useful.
If they succeed, it's well worth it ... because if you could control
even just 50 atoms, you would have more computing power
than the biggest supercomputer on the planet today. (That's
because for every atom that you add to the mix, the computing
power of a quantum computer literally doubles!)
In fact, there is going to be BIG BIG trouble when a real quantum
computer hits the road, because a quantum computer would be
so powerful, it would easily break pretty much all of the
government, internet, banking computer security codes in use
today.
It would be a nightmare, until every switches over to a security
system based on quantum mechanics!
So for that reason, it has been a relief that really, easily workable
quantum computers are supposedly still about 20 years away.
But now, this company from British Columbia comes along and
practically out of nowhere is claiming that it can control not only
16 q-bits and that it can just manage nicely 32 quits and even
1,000 q-bits in another year or so ... and is acting as if they
have some magical solution to the "scaling up" problem that
hundreds of brilliant scients with mega-millions, even billions of
dollars worth of equipment have not yet been able to achieve.
Even assuming they really have the equipment to make this
work, the equipment would be so expensive, how would the
business model work? They figure they can just "rent" time on
this quantum computer of theirs and easily come up with
answers that companies will pay massive dollars for?
There is something fishy about this story.
The fact that this company has not published its advances so
far in any science journal and was not prepared to actually show
off this "quantum computer" and would only show a video ... and
that it is making seemingly outlandish claims of being able to
easily control more than 1,000 atoms at a time ....
That's what we need to be suspicious about!
I think it's a marketing ploy.
On the other hand, there will now be a mad rush to find ways to defend against criminals with access to such systems. For banks and governments, this could mean replacing all existing hardware with Quantum compatible equipment, at huge cost.
Want to bet paper documents will become King again?
(it may be unfeasable, but it doesn't hurt to keep an open mind)
quantum about their system. So far, all we know is that they
have a well-developed interface for communicating with their
system. But, there are serious open questions about the
implementation they have chosen.
I'd like to point out a few inaccuracies in the article:
"a computer that calculates by studying the behavior of a
niobium atom"
and
"Each qubit consists of dots of the element niobium surrounded
by coils of wire."
Qubits are sometimes referred to as artificial atoms, but they are
not the same as actual atoms. D-wave uses persistant current
loops as their qubits. Current flows clockwise or counter-
clockwise around the loop. The current produces a small
magnetic field which can be measured with a SQUID (essentially
a very sensitive magnetomemter).
"Because scientists understand how niobium will react to
magnetic fields and calculate the exact pattern and timing of the
magnetic fields created, the pattern of changes exhibited by the
niobium can then be translated into an answer that humans can
understand."
This has very little to do with niobium. The important thing is
that niobium is a superconductor with a relatively high transition
temperature (about 9 Kelvin) and that there are robust processes
for fabricating Josephson junctions (a critical element of their
qubit and SQUID readout) with niobium. But this could also be
done with aluminum. Also, you don't calculate the state of each
qubit, you measure it. If you could calculate the state
beforehand, there would be no need to have the quantum
computer. It happens that D-wave is using few enough qubits
that you CAN calculate the evolution of their system, which is
why most scientists are extremely skeptical of this
announcement.
"Ultimately, D-Wave's computer is an analog computer,
according to Alexey Andreev"
if it's an analog computer, then it definitely is not a quantum
computer
I'm glad that D-Wave is getting quantum computing in the news
again, I just hope they aren't pulling the wool over our eyes.
QUbit's are not refered to as artifical atoms but the association exists with artifical atoms in that most quantum experiments are done with Artifical atoms. Since the process is easier to manufacture and control.
Also niobium-titanium alloy is a super conductor not niobium itself. And its a conductor at 17k not 9k lead conducts at 7k.
Josephson Junctions,refers to the phenomenon of current flow across two weakly coupled superconductors.
A SQUID is a Superconducting Quantum Interference Device.
Early Superconducting experiments used RF SQUID's as the QUBIT. These were typical a superconducting Aluminum alloy loop with insulation to create the Jospehson Junction Phenominum.
The arguement here has so many terms mish mashed together oftem refering to one theory or threoum on Quantum computing and mixing it with another.
Your question about how they would prove that their system is quantum is a good one, since it does not have an obvious answer. For a traditional gate-based quantum computer, one would want to see coherent control of the qubits (called Rabi oscillations) and state tomography to demonstrate entanglement of qubits. D-Wave is attempting something very different, called an adiabatic quantum computer. The same tests don't apply here. But, it would be nice for them to demonstrate a feature of their system, like an avoided crossing between coupled qubits, to show that it is at least quantum-like.
They could also just solve a problem from a 3rd party in a time which is much faster than is possible which a conventional computer.
chash360:
You make a fair point about analog = measured result. I guess my beef is just when you say "analog computer," people associate that with the sort of examples you mention, which are are classical systems. Also, many journalists seem to think that a qubit is the same as an analog bit, ie. that a qubit can have a real value between 0 and 1. This casts the phenomenon of superposition of states in a way which is very misleading.
Wolivere:
You seem to be familiar with some of the past efforts to do quantum computing with superconducting systems. But, I want to clarify a few things. First of all, it is very common in the literature to refer to qubits as artificial atoms. See, for instance:
http://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0407325
Nature (London) 431, 162-167 (2004)
Secondly, Niobium is a superconductor all on its own. I believe your confusion comes from the fact that NbTi is the favored material for making superconducting magnets, like you would find in any MRI machine, because it is very ductile. Before NbTi came around, Nb3Sn was a common choice for magnet wire. However, plain ol' niobium is still a type II superconductor.
It would appear that with D-Wave's technology, we need to do the cooling capacity first and then insert as much computing power as possible. And so the cost trade-off of digital vs quantum computing will be how the information entropy of the complexity of the problem solved is mapped into physical entropy (i.e., heat dissipation) in either method. May the lower contributor to heat genrated per bit of information be the winner.
My prediction, needs large scale to be economic from the get go. My second prediciton is that it will be used successfully in risk models for finance first and be deployed convincingly in 5 years. The D-Wave programmers need to show others how to represent their problems in an analog fashion.
Forty years ago, Morris Rubinoff (RIP), my teacher in a graduate hardware course at UPenn said Analog computers would succeed in the end because of the nature of the problems they solve. He also predicted hybrids. Think I will call the cost of quantum computing curve Rubinoff's Law. Question: What is the analog (pun not intended) in quantum computing to transistor in digital? Answer: What is a qubit. Last question: What is the period of doubling? Answer: ??
- Initial Quantum computing will remain in the relm of calculatable ourcomes until the system becomes trusted.
- Beyond the calculatable outcomes, quantum computers will need to be used to further develop quantum computers
- Once the processing hardware matures, we'll need to develop true AI "developer" programs that can write feaky complex programs beyond the abuility for human developers to write and test.
Suddenly Isamov's laws come to mind; no robot may hurt a human through action or inaction.. . .
Do not confuse a Qbit (Quantum bit) with a Qbert (Old vidio game where an alien jumps around flipping boxes and trying not to to get stepped on by a snake)
brainy: http://brain.com
Or we would be stuck in a limbo type state. To me what would be the point as the universe is set a certain way.
A spreading effect. Basically if we comprehend all this now then, it exists now and somehow we are just trying to put it all to good use.
So with our imagination, or brain, it is involved; as we reach the speed of light time does slow down. As we think of everything using our imagination time does seem to stop as we sort of comprehend everthing. But it's only from our own perspective.
Maybe having the multiverse inside a Quantum computer system is the right way to do that type of universal control safely or even realistically as we could have it on such a minute size where it would not effect other's universes.
I only saw Dune the movie.
they use the old fashioned way. they actually run the calculation a bunch of times--like 100 or so--and compare results. That wouldn't work so hot in a digital computer but works for an analog. The answers on the first crank, rose added, are in the vast majority of cases the best solution to the problem.
- QSql
- by davidmec February 16, 2007 5:51 AM PST
- How would SQL have to be modified for Quantum computing, It is already constraint based (mostly).
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