Quantum computing
Quantum computing is the use of quantum-mechanical phenomena such as superposition and entanglement to perform computation. A quantum computer is used to perform such computation, which can be implemented theoretically or physically.
The field of quantum computing is actually a sub-field of quantum information science, which includes quantum cryptography and quantum communication. Quantum Computing was started in the early 1980s when Richard Feynman and Yuri Manin expressed the idea that a quantum computer had the potential to simulate things that a classical computer could not. In 1994, Peter Shor shocked the world with an algorithm that had the potential to decrypt all secured communications.
There are two main approaches to physically implementing a quantum computer currently, analog and digital. Analog approaches are further divided into quantum simulation, quantum annealing, and adiabatic quantum computation. Digital quantum computers use quantum logic gates to do computation. Both approaches use quantum bits or qubits.
Selected article
In quantum computing, a qubit (/ˈkjuːbɪt/) or quantum bit (sometimes qbit) is a unit of quantum information—the quantum analogue of the classical bit. A qubit is a two-state quantum-mechanical system, such as the polarization of a single photon: here the two states are vertical polarization and horizontal polarization. In a classical system, a bit would have to be in one state or the other. However, quantum mechanics allows the qubit to be in a superposition of both states at the same time, a property that is fundamental to quantum computing.
Selected biography
David Elieser Deutsch FRS (/dɔɪtʃ/; born 18 May 1953) is a British physicist at the University of Oxford. He is a Visiting Professor in the Department of Atomic and Laser Physics at the Centre for Quantum Computation (CQC) in the Clarendon Laboratory of the University of Oxford. He pioneered the field of quantum computation by formulating a description for a quantum Turing machine, as well as specifying an algorithm designed to run on a quantum computer. He is a proponent of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In the news
Google has recently created a program called OpenFermion to help generate the appropriate algorithm for a quantum computer to simulate a chemical molecule. The program is open source and available on GitHub. It is meant to allow chemists to solve their problems without having an extensive knowledge of quantum computing, or vice versa. Microsoft announced a similar project in September, though not nearly as many details were given, and their project was not open source. People are encouraged to contribute to the OpenFermion GitHub repository.
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Did you know?
- ...that Google has announced that it expects to achieve quantum supremacy by the end of 2017, and IBM says that the best classical computers will be beaten on some task within about five years?
- ...that one of the greatest challenges in building a quantum computer is controlling or removing quantum decoherence?
- ...that there are many quantum computing models, including one where photons are the qubits and quantum gates are represented by linear optical components?
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