Japan team reports quantum computing breakthrough

Infoworld ^ | October 29, 2003 | Martyn Williams

[Fledermaus]

Never mind that, I'm just waiting until we get brain plugs and just put the connection into our heads.

But, of course, that would completely shut down DU.

[Fledermaus]

Hey! We smarmy economic pundit types have feelings you know! ;-)

[sourcery]

Significant inventions/discoveries of the 20th Century by non-Americans:

• Television
• Penicillin
• The Turing Machine (mathematical computer)
• DNA
• Heart/organ transplants
• jet-powered flight
• rocketry and space travel

Source: The Century's Top 12 Discoveries & Inventions

[jwh_Denver]

but the US has contributed much more than its per-capita share over the last 200 years or so.

My understanding is that %90 of all inventions happen in the US.

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

"Our guess is anywhere between 10 years and 100 years from now," he said.

Ironically, if they had the quantum computer, they could calculate in one picosecond, the length of time (to ten-zillion decimal places) it would take to build a quantum computer.

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

Significant inventions/discoveries of the 20th Century by non-Americans:

The Internet (Al Gore)

[Unknowing]

NEC Corp ADR closed at 9.20 today, up 0.02 (+0.22%). Not exactly a quantum leap.

But I've got to wonder: what, as explained in Euclideo-Newtonian or Einstienian terms, the heck is happening in the pre-decoherence state (the quantum state); and what, other than the observation, causes the decoherence?

These questions are ontological, addressing being qua being. I understand the calculations of information content, but what exactly is being harnessed -- other than the information itself? Does this CNOT gate, in fact, manipulate information as entropy?

We don't anticipate the answers to these hypothetical questions to be provided in the published paper.

[Hank Rearden]

They'll need this computer to keep track of the national debt in a few years. If the Republicans keep it up, they'll need it next year.

[sourcery]

The most fundamental entity is the distinction. The absence of any distinction intrinsically forms a distinction between the existence and non-existence of distinction. Therefore, distinction must exist. From its existence, all else is derivable. See: The Laws of Form.

[Unknowing]

Yes, understood. I think that you and Spencer-Brown are really saying that a contradiction implies all possibilities. This principle of logic is axiomatic.

The quantum state, I suppose, then, is 'being' (e.g., energy or material), in the 'form' of a contradiction, transcendent to AND/OR distinctions. Which state resembles information, in my guess, perhaps more than it does any cognizable form of energy or matter.

In this view, the measurement, in effect, causes a reified or reifiable 'distinction' to be made, at some unspecified but possible level of higher metaphysical abstraction and objective consciousness, resulting in decoherence of the quantum object.

But I'm still wondering what it is.

[enuu]

Turing was British, wasn't he?

[AmericanVictory]

Another step toward disabling centralized command, borders and other features of the socialist "progressive" state. We'd better get better governance into the world.

[aquila48]

They'll need this computer to keep track of the national debt in a few years. If the Republicans keep it up, they'll need it next year.

My back-of-the-envolope scratches say that if the economy grows anything like the 7.25% it did the last quarter (let's be the conservatives we are and say 5%), then that will bring the deficit down from the current 500 bills or so to about 375 next year.

(A 5% gdp growth of our current 10 trillion economy means an extra 500 billions, the government gets roughly a quarter of that.)

All this assumes no new spending programs - a pipe dream in an election year.

[Yossarian]

I'm sorry, I have to disagree with the ordering of your list.

I submit that 'The Screw' would have been the very first thing ever invented...

[raybbr]

LOL.

Fighting the decoherence...

Isn't that what economists do all the time?

[TN4Liberty]

The first sattelite was Soviet. The first workable intercontinental rockets were German. I guess it depends on what is a discovery and what is simply an adaptation of an earlier discovery.

[MrsEmmaPeel]

Will this computer be able to figure out my checkbook?

Depends which reality your checkbook is in.

[Moonman62]

But if they can be developed, quantum computers hold the potential to revolutionize some aspects of computing because of their ability to calculate in a few seconds what might take a classical supercomputer millions of years to accomplish.

I'm sure that Microsoft can come up with something to slow it down.