In one step a quantum computer can do what a conventional computer needs several to accomplish.
Superposition is, nevertheless, crucial to the idea of building what is known as a quantum computer.
Even if up to a quarter of the qubits were lost, a quantum computer could still work.
FORBES: Teeny-Tiny Quantum Computers Take A Step Closer To Reality
In May Jurvetson invested in Vancouver, Canada-based D-Wave Systems, which aims to build a solid-state quantum computer.
If practical, development of a quantum computer could create a supercomputer with a billion-fold increase in performance.
One advantage of this method of making a quantum computer is that the atomic qubit stores can be manipulated relatively easily.
The Air Force is working to see if it can develop a low-power quantum computer using holograms and off the shelf parts.
FORBES: The Air Force Is Working On A Holographic Quantum Computer
Why Quantum Computer Services became AOL. And why Lucky Goldstar became LG.
Just simulating the abilities of a 40-qubit quantum computer would use all the resources of any of the most advanced supercomputers in the world.
The IBM team's quantum computer was a straw-thin vial filled with a rust-colored liquid packed with millions of copies of a single organic molecule.
Back then it was called AppleLink, a project commissioned by Apple Computer and a company called Quantum Computer Services to connect Apple II and Macintosh computers.
The D-Wave computer operates as an adiabatic quantum computer, and consists of a superconducting 128-qubit chip in a cryogenics system within a 10 square meter room.
This allows a quantum computer to perform a single mathematical function on many numbers at once, answering many different versions of one question at the same time.
The quantum integrated circuit includes two quantum bits (qubits), a quantum communication bus, two bits of quantum memory, and a resetting register comprising a simple quantum computer.
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But these packets, called photons, are also endowed with the indeterminate properties that make them quantum objects - so an optical computer can also be a quantum computer.
"Although we are still some way off actually building a quantum computer, the possibilities are extraordinary, " says Professor Neil Johnson of the University of Miami's Department of Physics.
Now Vlatko Vedral, an Oxford physicist, examines the claim that bits of information are the universe's basic units, and the universe as a whole is a giant quantum computer.
"It is true that any task a classical computer can do, a quantum computer can do, " says Jeff Kimble, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.
The Canadian-based company, which was founded in 1999, plans to use this round of financing to build on its hardware success by developing more applications for its D-Wave One quantum computer system.
FORBES: Jeff Bezos And The CIA Invest In D-Wave's Quantum Computer
This ability would allow a quantum computer to do the mathematical heavy-lifting required for, say, cracking secret codes, while even the fastest and most advanced supercomputers plod along on the same problem.
D-Wave Systems announced today that it has signed a multi-year contract with Lockheed Martin that includes the sale of its D-Wave One system, which is the first commercially available quantum computer.
Unfortunately, it involved building an artificially intelligent observer and, even more problematically, that observer had to be a quantum computer, a device that exploits quantum mechanics to do huge numbers of calculations in parallel.
In theory, this uncertainty should allow a full-sized quantum computer to do lots of calculations in parallel, and thus to solve problems that would take forever or, at least, several billion years on a traditional machine.
Two weeks ago a team led by Isaac Chuang at IBM (nyse: IBM - news - people) disclosed that it had built a 5-qubit quantum computer and used it to solve a relatively simple mathematical problem.
His father was an early backer of Quantum, Apollo Computer and LSI Logic.
Another student, named Yushi Wang, applied the principles of quantum physics to design a faster computer chip.
The strange science of quantum mechanics promises a revolution in computer power as radical as that following the invention of the transistor in the 1950s.
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