The quantum computer comes of age

Sunday, 04 February 2007

Steve Jurvetson, a nanotechnology venture capitalist extraordinaire, appears to have done it again. On his Flickr blog, Jurvetson has posted a picture of the core of a D-Wave Systems Inc. quantum computer to be unveiled Feb. 13. Jurvetson, who has invested in the company for the past three years, writes: This quantum computer employs the resources of 65,536 parallel universes to compute answers in a fundamentally new way. Quantum computers work differently than traditional computers, which store information as "bits." At present they are only useful for limited applications, perhaps most notably cryptography, in which they are potentially many, many times more efficient at cracking encryption codes. Essentially it taps into the eddies of quantum mechanics, making use of phenomena such as superposition to make calculations in a radically different way. One potentially very cool application of such computers is for modeling and understanding theoretical quantum mechanics, and possibly gaining insight into M Theory and other master theories that could explain the fundamental nature of the universe. On the down side, anyone with a quantum computer could hack into almost any computer system in the world rather easily. Source: here

 

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