Quantum Computers

[tw]

Amazing how Anna Nicole gets so much coverage when a real news event goes almost totally unreported. From The Economist of 17 Feb 2007:

Quantum computing
Orion's belter
The world's first practical quantum computer is unveiled

... For, on February 13th, D-Wave Systems, a firm based in Burnaby, near Vancouver, announced the existence of the world's first practical quantum computer.

On paper at least, quantum computers promise to reduce dramatically the time needed to solve a range of mathematical tasks known as NP-complete problems. One famous example is the travelling salesman problem ... a puzzle that increases exponentially in complexity with the number of cities considered. ...

Quantum computers ... encoding all possible permutations in the form of a small number of "qubits". ... By a process known as entanglement, two qubits can encode four different values simultaneously (00, 01, 10 and 11). Four qubits can represent 16 values, and so on. That means huge calculations can be done using a manageable number ...

D-Wave Systems chose two very practical problems to demonstrate its 16-qubit processor, which it has called Orion. One was a pattern-matching application for searching through a database of molecules ... The other was a scheduling application for assigning people to seats, subject to certain constraints. Airlines might be interested in that one. ...