On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 3:52 PM, Mike Archbold <[email protected]> wrote: > Thanks. In a kind of pure form quantum computation seems kind of > problematic now, but it seems like it could be hybridized in the not > to distant future. Example: suppose you wanted to capture all the > properties for some object in 8 bit registers, one register to > describe each property of the object. Instead of being limited to a > single property per register, now you can cram 2^8 -- 256 --properties > in a single register. A simply program could be crammed in another > register, so you could run the whole shebang out of just two > registers. The only time I tried parallel programming was on a Tandem > computer, and I never developed the hang of it really. Simpler just > to think serially. So some means of converting a program to parallel > from serial would be nice. doubtless people have tried that. Mike A
I suspect that you are thinking in terms of conventional computing. Are all of your operations time reversible? Most familiar operations like assignment, arithmetic, and array indexing, are not. You have to think in terms of rotations in complex vector space. Also, you can store a superposition of values in a qubit register, but then you can only read one of them out, and you won't know which one. Besides Shor's algorithm and Grover's algorithm, one application could be computational chemistry. Currently, there is no program that can input a chemical equation like CH4 + O2 and tell you what the reaction products will be and how much energy will be released. In theory, you could calculate it by modeling the motions of the atomic nuclei and electrons. But that requires solving the Schrodinger equation, which for n particles requires O(2^n) operations on a conventional computer. However, nature "computes" chemical reactions with O(n) operations in parallel in O(1) time. In theory, so could a quantum computer, if we knew how to build one. -- Matt Mahoney, [email protected] ------------------------------------------- AGI Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/21088071-f452e424 Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=21088071&id_secret=21088071-58d57657 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
