Two Bits, Qubits a Dollar

Analog is old. Digital is new. Quantum is next. The speed of global problem-solving is clearly accelerating as computing capacity develops to new levels. You’ve probably got more computing power on your tablet or enhanced smart phone than most of the NASA Apollo modules used on the moon missions of the late 1960s, early 1970s. Nations are competing to see who has the most elegant supercomputers in the world, where the measurement of processing speed is Floating Point Operations Per Second (FLOPS), and the speediest systems generate calculations based on a mind-numbing one thousand trillion calculations per second (Peta-FLOPS). Current systems in the United States, Japan, Australia and Western Europe are vying in the arena of 20+ Peta-FLOPS capacity. Some other systems create grids of many small computing systems, linking them for a massive unitary transactional calculation, in an effort to make greater computer power more accessible to those without huge Peta-FLOPS-capable systems.

All of these modern computing systems rely on a capacity-swallowing binary system, where every number in the world is measured by ones and zeros. Long analog numbers – the ones we learned to use in school – are expressed in incredibly longer chains of binary expressions that look more like modern art than numerical statements. If you didn’t need so much memory to express every number you wanted to use, you would need less memory and could speed up calculations with a smaller processor. And a smaller processor would be cheaper to build (not that cheap though), faster and create greater accessibility to people and institutions seeking more efficient ways of analyzing masses of data. Further, if the mathematical units of such a computer were capable of creating mini-models of real world molecular structures with increased accuracy, the value to practical applications would explode.

Enter the quantum computer, a new and evolving system that replaces the binary building blocks used in virtually every modern computing system in the world with more complex processing units – called qubits (literally quantum bits) – that have inherent problem-solving capacities (think of them as little model-simulators that can roll into each other and interact to mirror complex interactions in the real world) if they can be harnessed in appropriate software and driven in machines that provide a different kind of core memory and processing systems. These analytical machines would look at the world through the complex eyes of quantum mechanics, using quantum properties to represent data and perform operations on these data. So instead of a zero/one series of combinations, they would apply units such as depicted in the above graph (known as a Bloch sphere) to make their calculations. Yeah, I know, it’s a whole lot easier to think of them as components in a Lego structure than to understand the underlying math and physics.

Why does this matter to you? If the world were able to provide access to such computing power at significantly less cost than current Peta-FLOPS-capable supercomputers, if such computers could replicate interactions of complex experiments down to the molecular level – without actually conducting the experiment which could take years to perfect in the real world – then chemical, biological, medical and physics research could accelerate with millions and millions of virtual experiments until new cures, discoveries and solutions were readied for practical applications… and vastly fewer finalizing experiments would be required in the real world to implement the solutions.

Considered by some in the computer science world as the new Holy Grail of computing, the problem was how to harness qubits into an actual and functioning machine. It now seems that this process is no longer just a theoretical possibility thanks to nanotechnology. “[In later September,] a team of Australian and British scientists, led from the University of New South Wales, reported that they had successfully constructed one of the basic building blocks of modern quantum computing by relying on manufacturing techniques now used by the modern semiconductor industry… In February, a second group based at the University of New South Wales published an article in the journal Nature Nanotechnology reporting their advance: the construction of a single-atom transistor using a different but related design approach… In both cases, the research teams are international…

“While there is a growing consensus among scientists that working quantum computers will emerge during this decade, there is also a growing belief that they will not replace the conventional computers that are now carried in the pockets of more than half the world’s population. For one thing, most of the quantum computing approaches only worked when temperatures were cooled to near absolute zero…  Though there are only a handful of workable algorithms designed to run on quantum computers, scientists say their application may prove vastly more useful than today’s technology in simulating a wide variety of biological, chemical and physical systems. That means they could become the standard tool for a wide range of new industries, like drug and material design.” New York Times, September 28^th. Wow! This may be a little story in an isolated esoteric blog, but the ramifications for the world are staggering.

I’m Peter Dekom, and I now have to say “g’day, mate” with a great big, and very respectful, smile.