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World’s first commercial quantum computer sold to Lockheed Martin
1 Attachment(s)
Looking forward to some Joe Perez ruminations on this development.
The world’s first commercially available quantum computer, which uses principles of quantum mechanics rather than classical mechanics, was sold to aerospace, defense and security company Lockheed Martin. Unlike computers based on transistors, quantum computers rely on principles of quantum mechanics to conduct operations. The computers take advantage of properties like entanglement — when two particles have the same properties and behave identically while being separate — and storing data with “qubits,” or quantum bits. Typical bits store memory by registering an “on” or “off,” or a one or zero, while qubits can represent information as both memory and the state of entanglement with other particles. The quantum computer uses a system of 128 qubits, which means the computer will be able to solve more complex problems than traditional computers at a much higher speed. The computer is able to tackle computing-intensive problems related to number theory and optimization. One example is Shor’s Algorithm, a quantum algorithm that determines the prime factors of a large number quickly and efficiently. Given enough qubits, a quantum computer can use Shor’s Algorithm to break modern encryption algorithms like RSA encryption, a type of public-key cryptography. The computers can theoretically be significantly faster than regular computers and can solve much more complex problems. They could also lead to new kinds of encryption methods and security algorithms to secure data and model more complex systems — such as emulating how enzymes in the human body work and modeling more complex biological systems. D-Wave was founded in 1999 and calls itself “the quantum computing company.” It is selling the computer, called the “D-Wave One,” for $10 million per computer. The company will also perform maintenance on the computer and other professional services. Attachment 241073 |
cat in box.
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Is that a photo of Schrodinger's actual quantum cat?
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I am both extremely impressed and also not impressed at all. :D
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Originally Posted by Joe Perez
(Post 733096)
I am both extremely impressed and also not impressed at all. :D
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So long as nobody observes me, I should be fine...
... which may present something of a problem as I'm in Manhattan just at the moment, and tomorrow morning I need to ride a crowded subway train to JFK airport (which will be crowded) and then get onto a crowded airplane and fly to LAX (which will also be crowded) and then get onto a much smaller airplane (which, in terms of eyeballs per cubic meter of enclosed volume will be the most crowded of all). $5 says that some wiseass sysadmin at Lockheed slaps a sticker on the front of the machine which says: This is a computer. This is not a computer. On a more serious note, I've heard (vaguely) about the notion of quantum computing before, and now having read this, I just spent the past two hours reading up on the subject, and I have reached only one solid conclusion: Trying to understand how a quantum bit works makes me feel like a complete idiot. |
that's exactly how we feel ! lol
yeah, that's alien technology. the fact that they are talking about it publicly means that the next generation of it is already in use by gov., and defense contractors. probably something bio-electric, more a like human brain with living tissue linked nano circuits. |
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...och_sphere.svg
"The Bloch sphere is a representation of a qubit, the fundamental building block of quantum computers." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer |
The cake is a lie?
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Originally Posted by Splitime
(Post 733173)
The cake is a lie?
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The cake is simultaneously a lie and the truth until it is discovered.
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When I read into quantum mechanics I feel like I'm reading about magic.
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Originally Posted by rccote
(Post 733335)
When I read into quantum mechanics I feel like I'm reading about magic.
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Originally Posted by rccote
(Post 733335)
When I read into quantum mechanics I feel like I'm reading about magic.
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Oh quantum mechanics, how I love you and don't love you.
:love: :vash: Who the fuck makes a computer based on quantum mechanics. Or who comes up with the fucking principles of it. A computer based on particles that are there, but not there, and two places at the same time. How does that work in a computer. "Ah fuck, my memory data is now in the Marianas Trench." or "Ah fuck, my encrypted data is now in the enemies computer" |
Originally Posted by rccote
(Post 733335)
When I read into quantum mechanics I feel like I'm reading about magic.
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I was under the impression that quantum computers can't do anything significant because it may not be possible to get to the mechanically lowest state quantum.
Plus NOT using an algorithm to solve a problem sounds like the matter that went 'missing' from the universe. "Oops. There it is. Our bad, we weren't looking hard enough." |
If you measure the three qubits, you will observe a three-bit string. The probability of measuring a given string is the squared magnitude of that string's coefficient (i.e., the probability of measuring 000 = | a | 2, the probability of measuring 001 = | b | 2, etc..). Thus, measuring a quantum state described by complex coefficients (a,b,...,h) gives the classical probability distribution ( | a | 2, | b | 2,..., | h | 2) and we say that the quantum state "collapses" to a classical state as a result of making the measurement.
This shit really gets heavy. |
Originally Posted by Gearhead_318
(Post 733166)
That was precisely as helpful as trying to explain the abstract expressionist movement to a blind caveman, in Latin.
Originally Posted by NA6C-Guy
(Post 733405)
"Ah fuck, my memory data is now in the Marianas Trench."
Originally Posted by wayne_curr
(Post 733565)
If you measure the three qubits, you will observe a three-bit string. The probability of measuring a given string is the squared magnitude of that string's coefficient (i.e., the probability of measuring 000 = | a | 2, the probability of measuring 001 = | b | 2, etc..). Thus, measuring a quantum state described by complex coefficients (a,b,...,h) gives the classical probability distribution ( | a | 2, | b | 2,..., | h | 2) and we say that the quantum state "collapses" to a classical state as a result of making the measurement.
I'm starting to get an idea of how "normal" people probably react when they ask me what I do for a living and I actually tell them in any level of detail. |
I've been pondering this computer and how it could work all night, and I'm still no closer to understanding. So confuzing!!!
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Originally Posted by NA6C-Guy
(Post 733608)
I've been pondering this computer and how it could work all night, and I'm still no closer to understanding. So confuzing!!!
Another possibility is that physics has simply stopped working. |
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From your link:
The Turing machine, developed by Alan Turing in the 1930s, is a theoretical device that consists of tape of unlimited length that is divided into little squares. Each square can either hold a symbol (1 or 0) or be left blank. A read-write device reads these symbols and blanks, which gives the machine its instructions to perform a certain program. Does this sound familiar? Well, in a quantum Turing machine, the difference is that the tape exists in a quantum state, as does the read-write head. This means that the symbols on the tape can be either 0 or 1 or a superposition of 0 and 1; in other words the symbols are both 0 and 1 (and all points in between) at the same time. While a normal Turing machine can only perform one calculation at a time, a quantum Turing machine can perform many calculations at once. Today's computers, like a Turing machine, work by manipulating bits that exist in one of two states: a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers aren't limited to two states; they encode information as quantum bits, or qubits, which can exist in superposition. Qubits represent atoms, ions, photons or electrons and their respective control devices that are working together to act as computer memory and a processor. Because a quantum computer can contain these multiple states simultaneously, it has the potential to be millions of times more powerful than today's most powerful supercomputers. |
I still don't fucking understand how you can make a quantum computer. How do you make something reliable, when you can't control particles? They are doing their own thing regardless of what you want them to do. I'd like to see the innards of this computer up close, because I can't even begin to imagine what they look like. Maybe it's a sealed box of soda can tabs and it really is all a bunch of BS.
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Originally Posted by NA6C-Guy
(Post 733710)
Maybe it's a sealed box of soda can tabs and it really is all a bunch of BS.
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My girlfriend asked me why I dont get into theoretical quantum physics instead of engineering. I said I had thought about it but I found it interesting and not interesting at the same time. Whereas engineering is just always interesting =P
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Screw quantum computers. Give me a modem based on entanglement theory.
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I just wish I could understand how not knowing what the state of a bit is is faster than knowing what the state of it is.
Actually, that's not even what vexes me. What I'm struggling to understand (and haven't found any kind of explanation of whatsoever) is what does the underlying physical implementation of this technology consist of? In a conventional computer, you have physical devices (eg: CPUs, memory) which consist of silicon wafers onto which multiple stages of deposition / etching of various materials is performed, with the effect of creating an array of logic elements from discrete components such as biploar junction transistors, capacitors, etc. What's different about this machine? What is the physical stuff of which it's made? They talk on and on about how it consists of mysterious superconducting thingamajigs which are immersed in a cryogenic bath and placed inside of a heavily shielded enclosure, but what precisely are the magical superconducting thingamajigs made of? |
Originally Posted by Joe Perez
(Post 733773)
I just wish I could understand how not knowing what the state of a bit is is faster than knowing what the state of it is.
Actually, that's not even what vexes me. What I'm struggling to understand (and haven't found any kind of explanation of whatsoever) is what does the underlying physical implementation of this technology consist of? In a conventional computer, you have physical devices (eg: CPUs, memory) which consist of silicon wafers onto which multiple stages of deposition / etching of various materials is performed, with the effect of creating an array of logic elements from discrete components such as biploar junction transistors, capacitors, etc. What's different about this machine? What is the physical stuff of which it's made? They talk on and on about how it consists of mysterious superconducting thingamajigs which are immersed in a cryogenic bath and placed inside of a heavily shielded enclosure, but what precisely are the magical superconducting thingamajigs made of? |
Originally Posted by Joe Perez
(Post 733773)
What I'm struggling to understand (and haven't found any kind of explanation of whatsoever) is what does the underlying physical implementation of this technology consist of? In a conventional computer, you have physical devices (eg: CPUs, memory) which consist of silicon wafers onto which multiple stages of deposition / etching of various materials is performed, with the effect of creating an array of logic elements from discrete components such as biploar junction transistors, capacitors, etc.
What's different about this machine? What is the physical stuff of which it's made? They talk on and on about how it consists of mysterious superconducting thingamajigs which are immersed in a cryogenic bath and placed inside of a heavily shielded enclosure, but what precisely are the magical superconducting thingamajigs made of? |
Lol: "the tape exists in a quantum state, as does the read-write head"
So the read-write head is either 'reading, writing, or both' too? WTF? Seriously, reverse computing makes WAY more sense since reversing a calculation creates less heat than wiping the slate clean, and heat is why we can't make our processors 'small' But even that is some bazaaro-world crap. "no, it's more efficient to put the graphite back into your pencil, than it is to use a rubber eraser" |
http://www.thinkgeek.com/images/prod...o_schroddy.jpg
The IEEE apparently isn't very excited about D-wave. Granted, the following is about a year and a half old, but that's not a terribly long space of time within which to revolutionize mankind's understanding of physics. Loser: D-Wave Does Not Quantum Compute D-Wave Systems' quantum computers look to be bigger, costlier, and slower than conventional ones By ERICO GUIZZO / JANUARY 2010 This is part of IEEE Spectrum's special report: Winners & Losers VII D-Wave Systems, a Canadian start-up, recently booted up a custom-built, multimillion-dollar, liquid-helium-cooled beast of a computer that it says runs on quantum mechanics. That's right. D-Wave, a 55-person company operating out of an office park in Burnaby, B.C., claims to have built that almost mythical machine, that holy grail of computing, the stuff of sci-fi novels and technothrillers—the quantum computer. Such a system would exploit the bizarre physics that apply on ridiculously small scales to compute ridiculously fast, solving problems that could stymie today's supercomputers for the lifetime of the universe. Now, building a practical quantum computer has proved hard. Really hard. Despite efforts by some of the world's top physicists and engineers and the likes of IBM, HP, and NEC, progress has been slow. Ask the experts and they'll tell you these systems are a decade—or five—away. Yet D-Wave believes it can build them now. It has raised some US $65 million from investors that include Goldman Sachs and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, enlisted collaborators from Google and NASA, amassed 50 patents, and transformed its offices into a world-class quantum lab. Is Schrödinger's cat really out of the bag? To put things in perspective, consider that one of the most celebrated feats in quantum computing is the factoring of the number 15 (yep, that'd be 3 times 5). The problem is that today's state-of-the-art quantum systems can juggle only a handful of quantum bits, or qubits—the fundamental units of information in quantum computers. Whereas a conventional bit can be in one of two states, 0 or 1, a qubit can be 0, 1, or a superposition of 0 and 1. By linking and manipulating qubits, you can carry out quantum algorithms that solve problems in fewer steps and thus faster than with regular computers. With enough qubits—hundreds to thousands—quantum computers would be able to crack some of the hardest codes, search databases superquickly, and simulate complex quantum systems such as biomolecules. Rather than build a multipurpose quantum computer, D-Wave says it is building a specialized one, designed to solve specific math problems that have applications in science and business. Its current system has 128 qubits, which the company claims are enough for a research device, one that probably won't beat a powerful PC. To solve larger problems and outperform conventional computers, D-Wave plans to scale up to tens of thousands of qubits in the next two years, eventually reaching millions of qubits. But experts are skeptical that D-Wave's quantum computer is really, well, quantum. "If this were the real thing, we would know about it," says Christopher Monroe, a quantum-computing researcher at the University of Maryland, in College Park. He says D-Wave hasn't demonstrated "signatures" believed to be essential to quantum computers, such as entanglement, a coupling between qubits. Paul Benioff, a physicist who pioneered quantum computing at Argonne National Laboratory, in Illinois, notes that even the best prototypes can't keep more than 10 qubits in entangled states for long. "Because of this I am very skeptical of D-Wave's claims that it has produced a 128-qubit quantum computer," he says, adding that talk of reaching 10 000 qubits at this point is "advertising hype." Anthony Leggett, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Nobel laureate in physics, says that D-Wave has made claims that "have not been generally regarded as substantiated in the community." But it's all for real, says Geordie Rose, the cofounder and chief technology officer of D-Wave. "We are making good progress," he says, explaining that they are currently testing three 128-qubit systems, to be installed at institutions that will use them for research. D-Wave's system uses a chip with little loops of niobium metal containing Josephson junctions—two superconductors separated by an insulator. When the chip is cooled to very low temperatures, tiny electrical currents flowing around the loops exhibit quantum properties, and you can use the direction to represent the states of a qubit: Counterclockwise represents 0, clockwise represents 1, and current flowing both ways represents a superposition of 0 and 1. D-Wave's superconducting qubits are not new, and other groups use similar devices. But whereas most groups are trying to build the quantum logic gates from which all computing operations can be derived—an approach known as the gate model—D-Wave has adopted a different approach, called adiabatic quantum computation. Here's the gist: You initialize a collection of qubits to their lowest energy state. You then ever so gently (or adiabatically) turn on interactions between the qubits, thus encoding a quantum algorithm. In the end, the qubits drift to a new lowest-energy state. You then read out the qubits to get the results. With enough qubits, D-Wave believes it could beat today's best methods for approximating the solution to difficult optimization problems in financial engineering, logistics, machine learning, and bioinformatics, either by getting the same answer faster or getting a more exact solution. And herein lies the $65 million question for the company. By its own admission, D-Wave will have to go bigger than 128 qubits. But can its system scale up? Qubits are fragile entities, and stray magnetic fields and other environmental disturbances easily destroy their quantumness, or coherence. David DiVincenzo, a leading quantum computing expert at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., says that "there has yet to be an established methodology for how [adiabatic quantum computation] could function fault tolerantly," that is, with effective error correction. Umesh Vazirani, a computer scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, says D-Wave hasn't taken into account the need to control the rate of the adiabatic process. "Running the adiabatic algorithm without this 'tuning' gives no speedup," he says. For its part, D-Wave hasn't backtracked. Rose, the CTO, says the company is working on new experiments and simulations that should confirm whether its system operates as a quantum computer. D-Wave's investors are happy with the company's progress. "Quite happy," says Steve Jurvetson, a director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Hartmut Neven, a Google scientist who is using D-Wave's computer to design and test image-recognition algorithms, says the company is taking a "very sensible approach" and has "a very good chance at getting it to work." Rose says the collaboration with Google shows that the company is tackling real-world problems, even if it's at the proof-of-concept level. "Our ultimate objective is to build systems with spectacular performance on these sorts of problems," he says. But when asked whether things are still on track to reach tens of thousands of qubits in the next couple of years, Rose dodges the question. "Right now we are concentrating all our resources on getting the 128-qubit systems up and operational and delivering them to customers," he says. Which means D-Wave still has a long way until it can build a quantum computer that can solve large real-world problems—and that companies would pay good money for. Looks like Schrödinger's cat is still in the bag after all. |
Good find!
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Yeah, I saw some similarly skeptical articles. I'm not sure what to believe -- on the one hand, the challenges certainly seem valid, and it would be odd that we would go from basically no functional applications to a ready-to-use system without any intermediate steps. On the other hand, I'm guessing that the guys at Lockheed Martin aren't dummies, and they are willing to drop $10 million on this thing.
I'm torn between two likely conclusions: (1) Lockheed Martin is fully aware that this likely is nothing more than a lark, a barely useful project, and $10m is a drop in the bucket to them. (2) Lockheed Martin doesn't know if this is viable or not, but is willing to spend $10m for the opportunity to investigate it and possibly reverse-engineer it just in case it's something ground-breaking. |
Possibility #3: Quantum computer is a myth. $10M is seed money for some black project, and this is just a cover story.
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Originally Posted by mgeoffriau
(Post 734113)
(1) Lockheed Martin is fully aware that this likely is nothing more than a lark, a barely useful project, and $10m is a drop in the bucket to them.
One of the present-day leading supercomputer architectures is the IBM "Blue Gene". The current model, BlueGene/P, sells for approximately $1.3M per rack (4,096 processor cores per rack) and is scalable to configurations as large as 256 racks, yielding 1,048,562 processor cores, 1,024 Terabytes of RAM, and delivering an estimated performance of around 3.5 PetaFLOPs. (Such a configuration would presumably cost $332 million, not including installation costs and the construction of the building to house it in.) In that light, spending $10M for a computer really isn't all that big of a deal once you've reached a certain scale. The question which occurs to me is whether this machine is likely to deliver higher performance than $10M worth of a competing technology. I hate to be a skeptic on this one. I mean, computing is the one field in which so disproportionally many of the great advances of the past 50 years have been made by either some guy in his garage or some random group of guys working out of a small shop. This just seems less an invention in computing than a supposed redefining of our understanding of physics. We (as a species) are still at a point in our scientific comprehension where most discussion of quantum phenomena consists of sitting around arguing about whether it even exists and throwing tiny particles at things to try and see it in action, and here these folks claim that they've gone and built a whole machine out of the stuff. |
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