From the New York Times:
A Strange Computer Promises Great Speed
Our digital age is all about bits, those precise ones and zeros that are the stuff of modern computer code.
But a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time.It sounds preposterous, particularly to those familiar with the yes/no world of conventional computing. But academic researchers and scientists at companies like Microsoft, I.B.M. and Hewlett-Packard have been working to develop quantum computers.Now, Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.Skeptics say that D-Wave has yet to prove to outside scientists that it has solved the myriad challenges involved in quantum computation.But if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.“This is a revolution not unlike the early days of computing,” he said. “It is a transformation in the way computers are thought about.” Many others could find applications for D-Wave’s computers. Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.Quantum computing is so much faster than traditional computing because of the unusual properties of particles at the smallest level. Instead of the precision of ones and zeros that have been used to represent data since the earliest days of computers, quantum computing relies on the fact that subatomic particles inhabit a range of states. Different relationships among the particles may coexist, as well. Those probable states can be narrowed to determine an optimal outcome among a near-infinitude of possibilities, which allows certain types of problems to be solved rapidly.D-Wave, a 12-year-old company based in Vancouver, has received investments from Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, which operates one of the world’s largest computer systems, as well as from the investment bank Goldman Sachs and from In-Q-Tel, an investment firm with close ties to the Central Intelligence Agency and other government agencies....MORE
HT: Smithsonian Magazine: "Lockheed Martin Has Crazy-Fast Quantum Computers And Plans on Actually Using Them" .
However....
From The Physics of Finance:
Quantum Computing, Finally!! (or maybe not)
Today's New York Times has an article hailing the arrival of superfast practical quantum computers (weird thing pictured above), courtesy of Lockheed Martin who purchased one from a company called D-Wave Systems. As the article notes,
... a powerful new type of computer that is about to be commercially deployed by a major American military contractor is taking computing into the strange, subatomic realm of quantum mechanics. In that infinitesimal neighborhood, common sense logic no longer seems to apply. A one can be a one, or it can be a one and a zero and everything in between — all at the same time. ... Lockheed Martin — which bought an early version of such a computer from the Canadian company D-Wave Systems two years ago — is confident enough in the technology to upgrade it to commercial scale, becoming the first company to use quantum computing as part of its business.The article does mention that there are some skeptics. So beware.
Ten to fifteen years ago, I used to write frequently, mostly for New Scientist magazine, about research progress towards quantum computing. For anyone who hasn't read something about this, quantum computing would exploit the peculiar properties of quantum physics to do computation in a totally new way. It could potentially solve some problems very quickly that computers running on classical physics, as today's computers do, would never be able to solve. Without getting into any detail, the essential thing about quantum processes is their ability to explore many paths in parallel, rather than just doing one specific thing, which would give a quantum computer unprecedented processing power. Here's an article giving some basic information about the idea.
I stopped writing about quantum computing because I got bored with it, not the ideas, but the achingly slow progress in bringing the idea into reality. To make a really useful quantum computer you need to harness quantum degrees of freedom, "qubits," in single ions, photons, the spins of atoms, etc., and have the ability to carry out controlled logic operations on them. You would need lots of them, say hundreds and more, to do really valuable calculations, but to date no one has managed to create and control more than about 2 or 3. I wrote several articles a year noting major advances in quantum information storage, in error correction, in ways to transmit quantum information (which is more delicate than classical information) from one place to another and so on. Every article at some point had a weasel phrase like ".... this could be a major step towards practical quantum computing." They weren't. All of this was perfectly good, valuable physics work, but the practical computer receded into the future just as quickly as people made advances towards it. That seems to be true today.... except for one D-Wave Systems....MORE
Previously:
Answer a simple Question and win a million bucks:
P vs. NPThe Clay Mathematics Institute posted the prizes for seven damn-near insoluble math problems back in 2000.
The first of the Millennium questions to be solved, Poincaré's Conjecture, was proved in 2006. In 2010 the Institute announced that Dr. Grigoriy Perelman had indeed resolved the Conjecture. It was a big deal in Topology circles.
Perelman turned down the money and went back to his office.
Next up, one of the most difficult unanswered problems in Computer Sciences P vs. NP which will probably take a quantum computer to solve.*...