Thursday, November 27, 2008

Facts about Quantum computers

1) The wave particle duality concept is crap. It was an abomination in Physics and existed prior to the theory of Quantum Electro Dynamics. There is no duality. Photon is a particle. It just behaves probabilistically. This is very similar to what happened in the 19th century with electrons and the Maxwell’s equation.
2) Quantum computing will not always lead to an increase in speed. There are some special classes of problems where DNA and Quantum Computers can do wonders. These are typically Multi path routing problems (like the Traveling Salesman Problem).
In case of problems that need a linear search. The benefits of Quantum computing may be limited
3) Quantum computing is a complicated subject and is based on the application of q-bits (quantum bits). Let me try to explain it in a simpler way. Our current technology is based on transistors which basically work like switches and have just two states ON (1) or OFF (0). We also have tri state buffers but these are not logical design components. The issue here is that we are just using the flow of current for our device. Current is comprised of electrons and an electron has other properties like spin but we don’t use that. So as of now for our microchips, an electron has to "flow" to cause an effect and hence 200 electrons may cause just one bit to change. But instead if we make a device that also uses the charge and spin on an electron then the same 200 electrons can hold potentially 200 bits of information. This will be a drastic increase in our processing capability. However, because of the uncertainty associated with quantum mechanics, we cannot use Boolean algebra for computation. We have to rely on a more robust Vector space analysis.

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