OK, I guess I have a misconceptions afoot. I thought the intention was that you could read out eg. ALL states in a qubit register, not just a single state of many possible. And I know also that whatever you do get is probabalistic. That explains the claim that was made in the paper I was reading above. (Having spent a long time as a bank programmer too, I can tell you that they aren't going to like the idea of "probability" when it comes to balances. Nobody wants to have about $100...) I wonder too if these problems cannot someday be overcome. The gentleman above is writing sci-fi....
Mike On 3/20/13, Matt Mahoney <[email protected]> wrote: > 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/303/11943661-d9279dae > Modify Your Subscription: > https://www.listbox.com/member/?&; > Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com > ------------------------------------------- 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
