ThePanda

Turns out some people over in the cold land which lies to the north of my current location, and which certain friends of mine call home, have decided that they have a commercially viable quantum computer that they plan on selling soon. No specs seem to be easily visible on the website, so questions about whether this merely reflects their ability to multiply two numbers with some high probability of success, or an actually viable computer, currently abound. A quick search through Google Scholar yields nothing (no research papers, I am disappointed, no specs, and no papers make me unhappy), however the company did file for a bunch of Quantum Computing related patents in 2000 and 2004, though none seem to have been filed post January 2005, which leads to obvious questions about what in the world happened in the last month, and observations about the awesomeness of Google Patents.

Scientific American seems to have a story about this, painting a less rosy, more realistic picture, and much like everything else that can be seen, Flickr has an image.

Scientific American also claims that it won’t be breaking any encryption schemes, making this entirely worthless. Also the guy in the Scientific American article seems to accept the fact that it probably won’t be viable at larger scales, and might not scale up, and might not be the commercial success everyone wants it to be. Wait, a company announces a commercially viable quantum computer that might not work, and does so by solving a Sudoku (simple enough thanks to all the constraints and the magic of constraint programming)... Bah, this has been a disappointing discovery, I think I will go back to approximating my NP-complete problems.

Ze Panda

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 14th, 2007 at 2:27 am and is filed under Observances, article. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.