Maximum PC

It appears that quantum computers could prove to be more useful than many people have previously thought:



http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic ... _equations

Interesting.



That is my favourite kind of solution.

I wish they'd gone into more detail but I am pretty sure that it would have gone over my head.

OK, great...now where is this machine? It seems that no one has really successfully built a true quantum computer. I'm starting to think that we're thinking of problems we could potentially solve on a machine that has yet to fully exist.

LOL

Welcome to quantum computing.

Well, the truth of the matter is that computing models (Turing machine, Markov model, Parallel machines) have always preceded actual computing machinery. After all, who is going to invest the time and money into developing a machine when it isn't clear what the machine will be able to perform?

Regarding quantum computers, there is actually a pretty interesting debate/discussion (I'm not sure what to call it at this point) regarding D-Wave, a handful of well-known theorists, and now Google. Things are getting interesting... I just haven't had a chance to post it.

Quantum mechanics goes over everyones head! =)

Actually, I might hunt down this paper and one or more papers on Shor's algorithm because I'm curious about the algorithms, and more importantly from a research and computer science perspective, gathering some information about the theoretical model used to describe quantum computing. The theoretical model will/should abstract out all of those confusing bits... err, rather qubits. Sorry, I couldn't resist.