Posted on 12/11/2015 8:48:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
This week, Google announced a breakthrough that could prove its quantum computer is actually using quantum mechanics.
When researchers gave the D-Wave 2X a carefully crafted test problem, the 1,000-qubit computer solved it 100,000,000 times faster than a classical computer could.
Quite a few tech giants and government organizations are investing in quantum computing. And many of them, including Google, NASA, and Lockheed Martin, are working with the commercial quantum computers built by D-Wave.
The idea is that these devices can harness the counterintuitive effects of quantum mechanics to solve problems faster than conventional computers, which could potentially improve artificial intelligence, materials science, space exploration, and even Google web searches.
(Skeptics, however, have suggested these practical applications are far-fetched and that quantum computing would most likely be applied to a less glamorous business: proving the theories of quantum mechanics.)
No matter how we plan to use quantum computers, we have to jump a big hurdle first: proving that a computer is actually using quantum mechanics to solve a problem. One sign of QC in action is quantum speedup—and that's just what a team of Google researchers has discovered [disclosure: one of the researchers is friends with this author]. In their paper, released on the arXiv pre-print server, they designed a problem that a real quantum machine should be able to solve more effectively than a classical one. Then they posed this problem both to their D-Wave 2X and to a classical single-core computer.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
Whether it exists or not depends on whether you look at it.
So it gets an answer faster than any other, but due to the Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, the answer may or may not be correct?
Oh...but wait...it's Google.
OOOOH! What’s next!
Moore’s Law says it will be twice as awesome! ... you just have to wait.
"42"
Great, better graphics and gameplay on the next “Call of Duty” release.
The end of encryption?
What will it do for pr0N?
Ask it how to reverse entropy and keep asking until it comes up with a solution.
Does this mean we get an answer before we ask the question?
Can it go back in time to 2008 and warn people of the Obama Holocaust?
pfffft- not faster than my HP hexacore and my whopping 16 gig of memory- lol
Will it be like Nomad in the Star Trek TOS episode “The Changeling” or the one that was really Landru in “The Return of the Archons”?
And downloads Porn faster.
Yes. It can run all possible combinations of the encryption key at the same time.
Yes but you forget the law of video game dynamics which states that any new computer you buy will be completely incapable of playing a new video game in a few years time.
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