We are D-Wave Systems, Inc. The Quantum Computing Company

D-Wave Systems ^ | 02/07 | D-Wave

[theFIRMbss]

>I follow the "computer world" and it's not "big news"

I still remember
the preliminary buzz
about the face off

Kendall Square Research
and the Connections Machine
were going to have.

That came to nothing.
(Well, some cool court proceedings . . .)
But this is big news

in embryo and
it could signal a shift in
CPU design.

We must wait and see
how it plays out. But Freepers
now have a heads up.

[theFIRMbss]

>The loops then spontaneously flip until they reach a stable energy state, which represents the solution to the problem. ...
>>Is it just me, or does this sound suspiciously like the Improbability Drive?

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"When Joseph Plateau published his treatise on soap bubbles and film in 1873, soap bubbles already had their own place in literature and art. Plateau's problem consists in taking a generic curve in three-space and finding a surface with the least possible area bounded by that curve. The empirical solution may be obtained by dipping a tridimensional model of the curve into soapy water, resulting in a form called a minimal surface. When a soap bubble is blown, the soapy surface stretches; when blowing ceases, the film tends toward equilibrium. The sphere presents the least exterior surface area of all surfaces containing the same volume of air."

Architecture and Mathematics: Soap Bubbles and Soap Films, Michele Emmer, Professor of Mathematics Università di Roma
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Quantum state effects
are no different from other
cool tricks of nature.

Why shouldn't results
from the quantum world be used
like anything else?

[SunkenCiv]

;')

[theFIRMbss]

>an end-to-end quantum computing system powered by a 16-qubit quantum processor

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A qubit's most important distinction from a classical bit, however, is not the continuous nature of the state (which can be replicated by any analog quantity), but the fact that multiple qubits can exhibit quantum entanglement. Entanglement is a nonlocal property that allows a set of qubits to express superpositions of different binary strings (01010 and 11111, for example) simultaneously. Such "quantum parallelism" is one of the keys to the potential power of quantum computation. In essence, each independent state of the quantum particle used in the computer can follow its own independent computation path to conclusion while its other states are observed and changed.

A number of qubits taken together is a quantum register. Quantum computers perform calculations by manipulating qubits.

Similarly, a unit of quantum information in a 3-level quantum system is called a qutrit, by analogy with the unit of classical information trit. The term "Qudit" is used to denote a unit of quantum information in a d-level quantum system.

Benjamin Schumacher discovered a way of interpreting quantum states as information. He came up with a way of compressing the information in a state, and storing the information on a smaller number of states. This is now known as Schumacher compression. Schumacher is also credited with inventing the term qubit (See, for example, Phys. Rev. A 51 2738 (1995)).

The state space of a single qubit register can be represented geometrically by the Bloch sphere. This is a two dimentional space which has an underlying geometry of the surface of a sphere. This essentially means that the single qubit register space has two local degrees of freedom. An n-qubit register space has 2n+1 − 2 degrees of freedom. This is much larger than 2n, which is what one would expect classically with no entanglement.

[Wikipedia via Qubit at Quantiki – the free-content WWW resource in quantum information science]

[SunkenCiv]

http://datacompression.info/IncredibleClaims.shtml

[theFIRMbss]

Quantum Leap: Computer to 'Make Computer History'

By NED POTTER, ABC News

Feb. 12, 2007 — "Quantum Computing." It's one of those things that bring a sparkle to the eyes of propellerheads — and make the rest of us just scratch our heads.

But it's been a holy grail in the arcane world of supercomputers — and a Canadian firm claims it will be unveiling one on Tuesday. Nevermind that most engineers thought quantum computers were decades away.

D-Wave Systems, Inc., based near Vancouver, is the company that's been working on the project. Its machine is described as a computer that can perform 64,000 calculations at once.

Following the odd laws of quantum mechanics, the digital "bits" that race through its circuits ...