Quantum Leap, Minus The Crossdressing

Next week, Candian start-up D-Wave is preparing to present the worlds first quantum computer at the Computer History Museum in Moutain View, California.  The yet-to-be-proven computer claims to have 16 qubits of processing power, or roughly the same as the computers we all use today.  With plans for much more powerful machines in the coming years, D-Wave has some security experts worried, and some quantum experts confident that they are full of it.  So why is quantum computing important?

Well I’ll tell you first off that I’ve read multiple articles on the subject, visited D-Waves head D-bags blog, and I pity anyone who follows my footsteps.  Listening to(reading) what these guys have to say on the subject will make your eyes go crossed and your nards crawl up inside you.  Here’s a tidbit from D-Wave CTO Dr Geordie Rose’s blog.

The system they set up claims to be an adiabatic quantum computer with sixteen qubits. It has a Hamiltonian which is made up of ising interactions plus a single qubit term which is along the direction of the ising interaction and a transverse field. The idea, of course, is to use this for adiabatic quantum algorithms. Finding the ground state of a two dimensional ising model with a magnetic field (where each of the field values of the ising terms of magnetic field terms is a problem instance) is NP-complete. So the idea, I guess is to start with all transverse magnetic field, and start in the ground state of this system, and then drag the system to the new groundstate of the Ising model on your sixteen qubits.

OF COURSE! ADIABATIC QUANTUM ALGORITHMS!  YOU’D BE A FOOL TO USE ANYTHING ELSE! 

 In other words, don’t bother reading anything on quantum computers that was written by anyone who knows anything about quantum computers.  You won’t get it.  Cool?

Now let me sum up why quantum computers are important to dolts like us.  Quantum Computers can tackle certain problems so well that they make modern super computers look like pocket calculators.  Those same super computers make our top-of-the-line desktop PCs look like musical greeting cards.  So you can imagine why this could be such a HUGE breakthrough.

The example everyone seems to be using to describe the power of quantum computing is the brute-force password attack.  This is where a computer randomly tries characters until successfully guesses your password.  Lets say you really REALLY want to snoop around the adult website wizardsleeve.com.  Unless you wanna pay to get your fix, you may gain entry to the site by using a brute-force program to guess someones password.  If you know the password is 8 digits long, and the password is AAAAAAAA, then you’ll crack the password on your first try(assuming your program tries AAAAAAAA, then AAAAAAAB, etc.).  However, if the password is anywhere from 4 to 16 digits long, and the password is 9d*#Vg!1)5cz, you may be waiting quite some time to succeed.  This is where quantum computing shines.

It takes a long time to crack a code.  If there are X possible codes to check, then using a brute-force program on todays PC could mean…

On average, success=(X+1)/2

So 1000 possible solutions means you with have to guess an average of 500.5 times for each password you correctly guess.  With Quantum computing, the average number of guesses is X-squared, or 32.  That’s huge.  To beat a really dead horse a bit more, if X=1 billion….then a classic computer would take 5 million tries and a quantum computer would take 1 million.  That’s pretty wild.

The other great thing about quantum computing is that their power grows exponentially as you add more qubits.  So the quantum computer that D-wave is demoing has 16 qubits.  It can show off about 65,000 different states.  Pretty cool.  Well, if you had 300 qubits, you could have more states than there are known atoms in the universe, and D-Wave is planning a 1000 qubit computer by 2008.  WTF?

There are still problems with quantum computers, even if D-Wave is successful.  The qubits need to be isolated completely from the outside world, and furthermore have a difficult time correcting errors(required by every computer…especially those running Windows…oh snap!)  With that said, I don’t think you’ll find rainman Ray Babbot pacing the local Best Buy anytime soon mumbling, “Quantums never crash!”.

  Everyday there are amazing breakthroughs and advances in all areas of technology and science.  Getting these advanced discoveries to the people is a whole other story.  If D-Wave isn’t full of it, I believe it will give others the guidelines and a path to bring quantum computers to reality.  To bad I’ll probably be dead by the time the average idiots out there can experience the joy of a quantum desktop PC.