May 27, 2003
QUANTUM COMPUTERS
The last few weeks haven’t been very newsworthy. Intel announced another problem with the Itanium 2 processors. I’m not going to go into it because we don’t sell that many Itaniums. AMD has another price drop scheduled for today. We will see the affects of that over the next week or so. Nothing spectacular to discuss so I went back into my archives to pull out information that I thought I had written about when the news was released but I can’t find it anywhere in the newsletter archives. Here it is:
Have you ever heard of a quantum computer? Over the past couple of years great strides have been made to create and use a quantum computer. Most of the work has been done by IBM, Caltech, Los Alamos National Labs, Oxford, or some other laboratory with the capability of manipulating subatomic particles. This is a very difficult topic to discuss because I am far from an expert on the subject. However, what I am trying to get across is simple. The possibility of quantum computers being used in our lifetime is very real. Let me see if I can explain the significance of this.
First you need to understand the basis of today’s computers. The PC’s we use manipulate bits or binary code. Digits that are either 1 or 0 in combination can represent anything from text to the status of any piece of given hardware. The 1 or 0 is the same as on or off. Today’s physics tell us that something either is or it is not. That is, simply put a 1 or a 0. To understand Quantum computers that is all that needs to be said.
The rest is somewhat mind blowing so if you are a physicist, chemist, or scientist, please forgive me. A quantum computer does not operate on the basis that something either is or isn’t. Instead it observes the state of Quantum bits or qubits. A qubit might represent a 1 or 0, a combination of the two, or a state somewhere between 1 and 0.
Quantum physics states that a subatomic particle can’t be said to absolutely exist. It exhibits a statistical probability to exist in a specific place and time. However, there is no way to prove it exists until it is observed at which point all the probabilities break down into a definite state. In other words, how can you prove that something exists until you see it exist? If you see it existing then how can it also exist elsewhere? Quantum physics tells us that there must be an infinite number of alternative universes since there is no way to account for the states of existence without an observer to confirm that they exist. Since we have no way of getting to these alternative universes how does this help us in making computers? The answer is very close at hand.
I tried to find an article I read a couple of years ago in the Rocky Mountain News. There was an announcement made by scientists at University of Colorado regarding this theory. If I remember correctly it said that they had proven the quantum theory. In the simplest of terms they were able to make a subatomic particle exist in two places at the same time for a very small fraction of time. If they can observe the state of one particle in two places at once then there must be a way to observe it in many other states. Doing this on a small scale has been accomplished with two to five atoms. Doing this on a functional large scale will be much more difficult. Consider the difficulties in containing and manipulating subatomic particles.
Instead of going into more detail about how a quantum computer operates let me just end with the possibilities. Anyway, I am giving myself a headache.
If all the processing power of all the computers in existence in the world today were combined, it would take millions of years to perform a calculation that a quantum computer could perform in the fraction of second. How’s that for “a fast box”? Don’t count on having one on your desktop however. When they become functional they won’t be used for word processing. Most likely our government, military, and scientists will use them for cryptography. They may also be used for modeling and indexing very large databases.
S&K