Techno-News Blog Ray Schroeder, editor, OTEL - University of Illinois at Springfield |
|
|
Technology News for Higher Education Times and Dates Coordinated Universal Time
Subscribe to Techno-News Blog by Email
|
Monday, January 06, 2003
Practical quantum computers are another step closer, the Economist
THE dream of the mechanics who design quantum computers is to take a problem—the increasingly spooky behaviour of electronic components as they grow smaller, due to the effects predicted by quantum theory—and turn it into advantage. These quantum mechanics hope to use one of that theory's main planks, the uncertainty principle, to allow them to design machines that can do “massively parallel” calculations which are beyond even the theoretical capabilities of conventional computers. That, in turn, would allow currently insoluble problems (including some in the field of cryptography) to be crunched reasonably conveniently. Building a practical quantum computer will be hard. But another step towards one has just been announced in Nature. Stephan Gulde, of the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, and his colleagues have built a prototype machine whose chief working part is a single atom of calcium, and they have run a program on it.
Comments:
Post a Comment
|
