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NEW YORK: By isolating and repeatedly transporting a single, trapped electron from one point on a wire to another, two independent teams of quantum physicists have completed the first major step towards building a quantum computer.
While still in their infancy, quantum computers have the potential to be highly powerful machines, capable of solving certain complex problems much faster than classical computers.
Originally posted by TerryMcGuire
reply to post by Freedom_is_Slavery
Important advancement.
An important question then is will the psychopaths be able to turn this into an even bigger bomb?
Originally posted by consciousgod
reply to post by Freedom_is_Slavery
Appears these guys are too late. Lockhead Martin bought the first produced quantum computer for $10 million.
venturebeat.com...
D-Wave has been heavily criticized by some scientists in the quantum computing field.
According to Scott Aaronson, a Computer Science professor at MIT who specializes in the theory of quantum computing, D-Wave's demonstration did not prove anything about the workings of the computer.
He claimed a useful quantum computer would require a huge breakthrough in physics, which has not been published or shared with the physics community.
Dr. Aaronson has maintained or updated his criticisms on his blog.
Umesh Vazirani, a professor at UC Berkeley and one of the founders of quantum complexity theory, made the following criticism:
"Their claimed speedup over classical algorithms appears to be based on a misunderstanding of a paper my colleagues van Dam, Mosca and I wrote on "The power of adiabatic quantum computing." That speed up unfortunately does not hold in the setting at hand,
and therefore D-Wave's "quantum computer" even if it turns out to be a true quantum computer, and even if it can be scaled to thousands of qubits, would likely not be more powerful than a cell phone."
Wim van Dam, a professor at UC Santa Barbara, summarized the current scientific community consensus in the journal Nature:
"At the moment it is impossible to say if D-Wave's quantum computer is intrinsically equivalent to a classical computer or not. So until more is known about their error rates, caveat emptor "Let the buyer beware" is the least one can say."
Originally posted by Shamatt
Originally posted by TerryMcGuire
reply to post by Freedom_is_Slavery
Important advancement.
An important question then is will the psychopaths be able to turn this into an even bigger bomb?
No, it is a computer. Well, it is the early design for a small part of a future computer.
Did you mean can they use the computer to build a bomb? Duh!
Brilliant experiment. I have been keeping an eye on quantum computing for ages. Nice to see they have got past another stage in the puzle.