Quantum Computer presentation

It was announced as nothing short of a breakthrough in computing and although the developers at D-Wave Systems still need to fix some prototype issues, their version of a quantum computer that not only functions on paper is the closest I have seen so far.

Being intrigued by that topic ever since I came across the philosophical implications of quantum physics by the likes of Heisenberg and Bell, I was thrilled to find out a few years ago that you can use quantum entanglement as a method of key distribution of cryptographic systems by exploiting the phenomenon of perturbation by just observing (or, in that case, eavesdropping) a quantum system.

The quantum computer, however, is a whole different ballgame since its idea is centered around the phenomenon of superposition, most commonly known as the story of Schrödinger's cat. In a nutshell, a quantum computer yields its true power from the fact that it can calculate multiple operations simultaneously whereas any other computer based on the Von Neumann architecture (which we still use today) is based on linear calculation. This obviously means that in case the quantum computer will reach its commercial introduction, we would be able to calculate a lot of highly complex procedures a lot more efficiently and it would greatly benefit the sciences' quest for understanding the complexities of our everyday lives, such as genetic predisposition and -believe it or not- weather among thousands of other things (Do I sound too excited? Well, I am!).

Today's computers, like a Turing machine, work by manipulating bits that exist in one of two states: a 0 or a 1. Quantum computers aren't limited to two states; they encode information as quantum bits, or qubits. A qubit can be a 1 or a 0, or it can exist in a superposition that is simultaneously both 1 and 0 or somewhere in between. Qubits represent atoms that are working together to act as computer memory and a processor. Because a quantum computer can contain these multiple states simultaneously, it has the potential to be millions of times more powerful than today's most powerful supercomputers.

This superposition of qubits is what gives quantum computers their inherent parallelism. According to physicist David Deutsch, this parallelism allows a quantum computer to work on a million computations at once, while your desktop PC works on one. A 30-qubit quantum computer would equal the processing power of a conventional computer that could run at 10 teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second). Today's typical desktop computers run at speeds measured in gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second).

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