Quantum Electronics
Recently, scientists at Yale have created the world's first quantum integrated circuit. For those of you who are uninitiated in quantum mechanics, let me first preface this by saying that quantum mechanics do not, fundamentally, make intuitive sense. I don't understand them, and that's okay, because nobody does. But don't take my word for it:
The chip mentioned in the article is a two-bit chip. The two bits of this chip would allow it to investigate algorithms it could compute within the time of holding a q-bit (on the order of microseconds for this model) of a size less than four (22). For instance, say you had a list of four items. Provided a look-up could be done in less than the maximum time the q-bits can be made to persist on the chip, this could look up all four values simultaneously and return the one you wanted, as opposed to a regular chip, which would have to look at the first one, decide if it was the entry you asked for, then look at the second, and so on. That might not sound terribly impressive, but when you scale it up to chips of, say, 16 bits, then it could compute algorithms with 216 possibilities: 65,536 list lookups (in our example) in a single step. That's a tremendous speed boost.
It also spells out some other, less enjoyable implications in the field of security. Most of the current strong cryptographic systems hinge upon (in one form or another) the factoring problem. It runs something along the lines of: Given a number, determine if the number is prime. You've probably even been required to do this (or something like it) in grade school, and for small numbers, it's easy, as everything is fast for small n. However, the only known algorithm for this is to simply try dividing it by numbers. (You can eliminate some as you go, but not enough to really change the category of the problem.) Thus, arbitrarily large numbers can be chosen such that even a computer working at it's fastest speed has trouble completing the problem in any reasonable timeframe.
If you've noticed that this looks similar in pattern to looking up things in a list, you're catching on. A quantum chip could potentially test all numbers within it's maximum capabilities at once. Before, it was relatively easy to keep ahead of computers: a few extra bits in the factoring problem would add orders of magnitude greater difficulty and time to for brute-force solution techniques. With quantum chips, however, security would be in an arms race against chip manufacturers to increase the size of the key space faster than the capacity of chips could be increased. Alternatively, they could opt to try to make the algorithm longer, so that it couldn't be calculated within the lifetime of the q-bits needed to make the magical all-at-once computation happen. Either way, this could get interesting...
I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.Okay, that said, this marks a major milestone in quantum computing. What is quantum computing? Basically, it uses the very singular properties and behaviors of subatomic particles to calculate things in ways that seem utterly nonsensical, yet have fantastic power. Quantum computer bits may assume a bizarre state called a 'q-bit', in which they are both zero and one. Using this, a quantum computer may determine all possible outcomes of an algorithm in a single step!
-Richard Feynman
The chip mentioned in the article is a two-bit chip. The two bits of this chip would allow it to investigate algorithms it could compute within the time of holding a q-bit (on the order of microseconds for this model) of a size less than four (22). For instance, say you had a list of four items. Provided a look-up could be done in less than the maximum time the q-bits can be made to persist on the chip, this could look up all four values simultaneously and return the one you wanted, as opposed to a regular chip, which would have to look at the first one, decide if it was the entry you asked for, then look at the second, and so on. That might not sound terribly impressive, but when you scale it up to chips of, say, 16 bits, then it could compute algorithms with 216 possibilities: 65,536 list lookups (in our example) in a single step. That's a tremendous speed boost.
It also spells out some other, less enjoyable implications in the field of security. Most of the current strong cryptographic systems hinge upon (in one form or another) the factoring problem. It runs something along the lines of: Given a number, determine if the number is prime. You've probably even been required to do this (or something like it) in grade school, and for small numbers, it's easy, as everything is fast for small n. However, the only known algorithm for this is to simply try dividing it by numbers. (You can eliminate some as you go, but not enough to really change the category of the problem.) Thus, arbitrarily large numbers can be chosen such that even a computer working at it's fastest speed has trouble completing the problem in any reasonable timeframe.
If you've noticed that this looks similar in pattern to looking up things in a list, you're catching on. A quantum chip could potentially test all numbers within it's maximum capabilities at once. Before, it was relatively easy to keep ahead of computers: a few extra bits in the factoring problem would add orders of magnitude greater difficulty and time to for brute-force solution techniques. With quantum chips, however, security would be in an arms race against chip manufacturers to increase the size of the key space faster than the capacity of chips could be increased. Alternatively, they could opt to try to make the algorithm longer, so that it couldn't be calculated within the lifetime of the q-bits needed to make the magical all-at-once computation happen. Either way, this could get interesting...
Labels: Software
posted by Quantum Kitsune at 6:00 AM
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