Friday 16 February 2007

Quantum computing kicks into life

Brian S. emailed me to with the news that "the world's first commercial quantum computer has been demonstrated." Quantum computers use the quantum nature of matter to exponentially expand the computing power presently possible in a machine, even with today's super-computers. News here, at the Daily Tech site.
The demonstration of the technology was held at the Computer History Museum [in Mountain View, California], but the actual hardware remained in Burnaby, British Columbia where it was being chilled down to 5 millikelvin, or minus 273.145 degrees Celsius (colder than interstellar space), with liquid helium.
If true, this is massive news. This "breakthrough in quantum technology represents a substantial step forward in solving commercial and scientific problems which, until now, were considered intractable," says the CEO of the company whose computer this is.

LINKS: World's first quantum computer demonstrated - Daily Tech

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4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Brian,

Did David Deutsch get involve in this project? If not, then why not?

Anonymous said...

If such machines could be made available to climate scientist modelers of today, then perhaps the difficult task of modeling highly non-linear multi-couple feedback climate systems would be less difficult. I think, however that warmist scientists wouldn't be that enthusiastic about using such superfast machines as it would solve difficult modeling problems in a short time period thus revealing the inaccuracy , inefficiency & incompleteness of the current climate models which could reveal that we're not warming at all, just natural variability.

Anonymous said...

I think, however that warmist scientists wouldn't be that enthusiastic about using such superfast machines as it would solve difficult modeling problems in a short time period thus revealing the inaccuracy , inefficiency & incompleteness of the current climate models which could reveal that we're not warming at all, just natural variability.

what a load of crap. Any scientist would jump at the chance to have more number-crunching ability at their finger-tips.

Anonymous said...

Hemi said...
Any scientist would jump at the chance to have more number-crunching ability at their finger-tips.

Yes, sure, they would jump at the chance to adopt such fast machines as for simulations in areas that are perhaps don't polarize the global citizens such as Cosmology, Bio-molecular Dynamics, Quantum Mechanics, Fluid Dynamics, Computational Econonics.

This is why one of the reason that the 4th IPCC (2007) is downgrading some of the alarms raised in the 3rd IPCC (2001), because of simulation using faster computer since then. With increase in machine memory power over recent years, thus allow faster convergence of numerical linear algebra solution to the simulation, which revealed the over-hyped in the projections of 3rd IPCC (2001) models. Now scientists who revised some of the climate models from 3rd IPCC (2001), know that one of the reasons for wrong projections was because of using machines (even if they're super-computer) which were inefficient implementation of its floating point architecture.

Of course , climate scientists who don't hold a pre-determined view of global warming would love to use such super-fast machines, however some alarmists might want to avoid it as it might show the inefficiencies of their earlier models.