Imagine a laptop with the computing power of the world’s 10 most powerful supercomputers. Then you begin to grasp the potential of quantum computing.

If you missed the chance to buy into the computer industry when it was young, this is a second shot…

Penny Sleuth

Meanwhile, in other math news, a French computer scientist has calculated pi to a record 2.7 trillion digits, smashing the old record of 2.6 trillion. One can only imagine what unimaginable feats of pi calculation of which quantum computers might be capable. 2.8 trillion? Perhaps even 2.9 trillion? Who knows, or dares to dream…?

io9

What we have done is a 2 qubit (quantum bit), toy experiment – it won’t put anyone out of a job anytime soon… but if we scale to tens and then hundreds of qubits, that’s when we will exceed the computational capacity of the planet… that will happen [within] 50 years.

Computerworld

[The] challenge is getting people to understand quantum computing, which is so complex it appears to come from a parallel universe that abides by different physics laws.

As the process is scaled to involve multiple qubits, its computing capabilities become faster and more intelligent.

Business in Vancouver

Brain prosthetics. Telepathy. Punctual flights. A futurist’s vision of where quantum computers will take us.

CNNMoney

By taking advantage of the parallel computational capabilities of quantum bits, or qubits, quantum computers could effectively extend the reach of Moore’s law for many decades to come.

compoundsemiconductor.net

A quantum computer, if it comes to pass, would be able to perform several complex calculations simultaneously, making it exponentially more powerful than today’s supercomputers.

The Age

By lining up subatomic particles to encode information in a manner similar to the binary data found in conventional computers, such computers create “quantum bits,” subject to the strange workings of quantum physics. The payoff is that calculations get done without any old-school relativistic inefficiencies getting the way: less heat production, less power consumption, more grunt.

Wired

The researchers say that while a classical computer bit can be either black or white, a qubit could simultaneously take on all of the colors of the spectrum. Thus, a quantum computer could do many calculations simultaneously.

The sorting program they ran on their quantum computer is known as the Grover search algorithm. It is akin to opening four separate doors to find a ball hidden behind one of the doors. Using a conventional computer it would on average require opening more than two doors to locate the ball. The power of the quantum computer, said Dr. Chuang, is that it can open all four doors and locate the ball in a single step.

The New York Times

With the right set-up, the theory suggested, the computer would sometimes get an answer out of the computer even though the program did not run. And now researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have improved on the original design and built a non-running quantum computer that really works.

New Scientist

In principle, a quantum computer is a very much more powerful device than any existing or future classical computer because the super-position principle allows an extraordinarily large number of computations to be performed simultaneously.

Quantum Information Science and Technology Roadmap

Well, in a quantum Turing machine, the difference is that the tape exists in a quantum state, as does the read-write head. This means that the symbols on the tape can be either 0 or 1 or a superposition of 0 and 1; in other words the symbols are both 0 and 1 (and all points in between) at the same time. While a normal Turing machine can only perform one calculation at a time, a quantum Turing machine can perform many calculations at once.

This superposition of qubits is what gives quantum computers their inherent parallelism. According to physicist David Deutsch, this parallelism allows a quantum computer to work on a million computations at once, while your desktop PC works on one. A 30-qubit quantum computer would equal the processing power of a conventional computer that could run at 10 teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second). Today’s typical desktop computers run at speeds measured in gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second).

How stuff works

Quantum computing refers to the use of atoms to compute. It requires harnessing the highly unusual and eccentric properties of atoms to create infinite computing capacity.

Trying to picture the impact quantum computing might have on our daily life is a little like wondering, in 1945, how computers would change the world. Imagine the power of a computer with 10 million times the capacity of current computers. The age of the universe could be calculated in seconds, top-secret codes cracked immediately and web downloads could happen almost instantly. Think of any process or calculation your computer does now, then imagine it occurring 10 million times faster. And that’s just the beginning.

2008 Australia Museum Eureka Prize

Quantum computing could go 16 billion billion times faster than today’s 64 bit processors, giving computers such brute force power that today’s almost impossible to crack passwords could be cracked in seconds or minutes, and computer interaction with humans would theoretically be on a scale where they spoke back to us and interacted as seemingly normal people, albeit still as computers that did what we asked them to do unless they spontaneously develop a consciousness as has been predicted by many science fiction writers.

A quantum computer could easily be the brain of future humanoid robots, even androids as portrayed in Blade Runner and elsewhere, but we’ve obviously got a long way to go before that happens.

Blorge

Quantum computers still work with half their bits missing.

Cosmos Magazine

Quantum computer technology can solve what are known as “NP-hard problems. These are the problems where the sheer volume of complex data and variables prevent digital computers from achieving results in a reasonable amount of time. Such problems are associated with life sciences, biometrics, logistics, parametric database search and quantitative finance, among many other commercial and scientific areas.

Herb Martin, CEO D-Wave Systems

Basically, if you have a cat in a closed box, and poisonous gas is released. The cat is either dead, 0, or alive, 1. Until I open the box to find out, it exists in both states—a superposition.

Gizmodo