Computing just took quantum leap.....
Behold your computer. Your computer represents the culmination of years of technological advancements beginning with the early ideas of Charles Babbage (1791-1871) and eventual creation of the first computer by German engineer Konrad Zuse in 1941. Surprisingly however, the high speed modern computer sitting in front of you is fundamentally no different from its gargantuan 30 ton ancestors, which were equipped with some 18000 vacuum tubes and 500 miles of wiring! Although computers have become more compact and considerably faster in performing their task, the task remains the same: to manipulate and interpret an encoding of binary bits into a useful computational result. A bit is a fundamental unit of information, classically represented as a 0 or 1 in your digital computer. Each classical bit is physically realized through a macroscopic physical system, such as the magnetization on a hard disk or the charge on a capacitor. A document, for example, comprised of n-characters stored on the hard drive of a typical computer is accordingly described by a string of 8n zeros and ones.
Will we ever have the amount of computing power we need or want? If, as
Modern digital computers are based on bits - something which can be toggled back and forthbetween two states (e.g. magnetized or demagnetized). By representing these two states as 0 and 1, we can do binary arithmetic with sets of bits and the devices that toggle them. Everything else is built from there ... In quantum mechanics we see many physical systems as have two states (e.g. spin up or spin down). We refer to each such "bit" as a qubit. However, qubits are quantum mechanical and as such they behave much differently than bits. They exist in a superposition of 0 and 1 states simultaneously and may couple with neighboring qubits.
There is an old saying that "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". To somebody trained in conventional computing a qubit might look completely impractical because they have learned to see problems in terms of how you can solve them with bits and bit operations. However, as we examine what can be done with qubits, there are many problems where they are clearly the superior tool to use.
An array of qubits operates as a parallel computer capable of performing a large calculation in one step, and the power grows rapidly with the number of qubits. One application is the factoring of numbers. This is significant because it is the basis of standard security schemes for encrypting numbers.A 30 qubit computer would be 5 times more powerful than the worlds fastest present supercomputer and could break any known code.
A quantum computer is a device for computation that makes direct use of distinctively quantum mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data. In a classical (or conventional) computer, information is stored as bits; in a quantum computer, it is stored as qubits (quantum binary digits). The basic principle of quantum computation is that the quantum properties can be used to represent and structure data, and that quantum mechanisms can be devised and built to perform operations with these data.
At present, quantum computers and quantum information technology remains in its pioneering stage. At this very moment obstacles are being surmounted that will provide the knowledge needed to thrust quantum computers up to their rightful position as the fastest computational machines in existence.Thereby, quantum computers will emerge as the superior computational devices at the very least, and perhaps one day make today's modern computer obsolete. Quantum computation has its origins in highly specialized fields of theoretical physics, but its future undoubtedly lies in the profound effect it will have on the lives of all mankind.
