Quantum Computing - A Prototype is Demonstrated

As a means (there are more than one being developed) of forcing the death of Moore's law into the very distant future, you cannot hope to beat quantum computing. Whereas conventional computing can, at best, make use of individual atoms to store bits of information (sort of like one man one vote), quantum computing makes use of the weirder features of quantum mechanics that hold sway at very small dimensions to allow unheard of processing power.

In traditional computing, binary code forms the most basic language, with an alphabet of only two letters: one and zero. Each unit of information, or bit, can register either of those two values. In quantum computing, however, the basic unit is called a "qubit," and can register simultaneous values of one and zero, making use of the phenomenon known as "superposition."

In the words of Seth Lloyd, writing for Technology Review:

Since one qubit can simultaneously represent two different values, two qubits can simultaneously represent four (00, 01, 10, and 11, in binary notation); four qubits can represent 16 values; eight qubits 256 values; and so on. Even a relatively small quantum computer, one that had a few tens of thousands of qubits, could consider so many different values at once that it would be able to break all known codes commonly used for secure Internet communication. Quantum computers might also be used for faster database searches, or to tackle hard problems that classical computers couldn't solve with all the time in the universe.

Now comes news that a Canadian company called D-Wave has built and tested a prototype of an "adiabatic quantum computer." The catch? The developers must prove that the computer is actually using adiabatic quantum computing. Turns out this is not an easy task. So stay tuned.

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