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IBM shows off quantum computing advances, says practical qubit computers close
- Intermernet 15y agoYay! Revolutionary tech within our grasp and we're concerned it can decrypt our VPN traffic! Nice priorities guys.
- haraldk 15y agoExactly. It's not like Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn et al could foresee what they were facilitating for when they built the Internet. Bring on quantum computing, and lets see what awesome stuff the rest of us can build on top of it
- weavejester 15y agoI'd be less concerned about my VPN and more concerned about how reliant our financial and military systems are on public key cryptography.
- jmsduran 15y agoI'm pretty sure once quantum computing takes off engineers will be able to safely port an already existing encryption protocol onto it, it is not a major concern to me.
- fuzionmonkey 15y agoThe point being made is that public-key encryption techniques assume that it is difficult to factor large numbers. Even with modern computers, this takes a very long time. But this wouldn't be true with quantum computers.
- Zaak 15y agoThe most popular and well-studied public-key encryption systems use factoring, but there are lots of other proposed schemes. The ability to quickly factor products of large primes would cause a temporary upset while alternative systems are brought in as replacements.
- dmarquis 15y agoIts not quite as easy as just swapping out schemes. As I understand it a practical quantum computer would break all proposed public key encryption methods except those based on lattice problems. Lattice based cryptography is still in the preliminary stages of research and is at the moment extremely slow compared to the currently popular encryption methods.
- bicknergseng 15y agoVPN, email, AES... really everything on the internet. While it is amazing and revolutionary, concern and awe are not mutually exclusive. Kinda weird you wouldn't be concerned that within 10-15 years all internet banking as it exists today will be compromised.
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- michael_nielsen 15y agoThe actual paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5533 http://arxiv.org/abs/1202.5533
- DennisP 15y agoProbably the most important application: quantum simulation. Solving any but the simplest quantum mechanics problems takes more computation than we can muster, but a quantum computer could do it easily. (Iirc, Feynmann wrote about this idea.)
- palish 15y agoHere is Feynman's paper on that subject: http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall04/cos576/papers/feynman82/feynman82.pdf http://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall04/cos576/pa... It's unfortunately the best quality I can find for free. The rest are locked behind paywalls (which is a tragedy).
- spicyj 15y agoThis copy looks to be somewhat better: http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman.pdf http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/Feynman.pdf
- zmanian 15y agoAnd probably the most important application of quantum simulation is the ability to solve the 3d structures of complex organic materials.
- nextparadigms 15y agoIs there any way they could be used to replace our PC's in the future, for general tasks?
- wmf 15y agoFor most problems, quantum computing is not faster. But when it is (theoretically) faster, it is much faster. Perhaps we may see quantum coprocessors one day.
- rbanffy 15y agoWe have seen already with the slow adoption of multi-processors and 64-bit computers that being able to run current software is required for any successful PC architecture. Even the devices currently replacing PCs for specific tasks still run OSs and software that's much closer to what we ran on our Apple II's decades ago than whatever that would orchestrate a purely quantum personal computer. Devices like the one IBM demonstrated will probably start as peripherals to more familiar computer architectures, much like our PCs have GPUs that vastly outperform the processors that control them, yet, are no more than assistants in the general operation of the computer.
- bh42222 15y agoOne of the things quantum computing might be applicable to is protein folding. If we can compute exactly how a protein would/should fold in linear time... well that could potentially lead to a cure for EVERYTHING.
- Flow 15y ago"According to IBM, 250 qubits would be able to store “more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.” This in itself is truly awesome — but then when you factor in that a quantum computer could perform logic on all of that data, in parallel, instantaneously" If this is correct, does this really imply that there are more dimensions than the 4 we are aware of? Shouldn't the calculations then be seen in other those extra-dimensions as well? (Thinking that this could be used to detect extra dimensional life and perhaps communication with them) Or does it simply mean that matter has more states than there are particles in the universe? :-/
- michael_nielsen 15y agoUnfortunately, the statement is incorrect. Holevo proved in 1973 that n qubits can only store n classical bits of information. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holevo%27s_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holevo%27s_theorem The statement about performing logic on all that data in parallel is misleading, at best.
- Flow 15y agoOk, thank you. I was thinking of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hidden_variable_theory and that those could be properties of particles skewed into extra dimensions. This is way over my math and physics skill, but it's still very fascinating.
- zitterbewegung 15y agoAccording to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bells_theorem Hidden variable theories don't make sense.
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- onemoreact 15y ago
- tobiasSoftware 15y agoObligatory XKCD: http://xkcd.com/678/ http://xkcd.com/678/