[extropy-chat] A Quantum Computer on the market by 2008?

[Damien Broderick]

At 03:04 PM 6/27/2005 -0400, JKC wrote:

><http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/forward_quantum.asp>http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/05/07/issue/forward_quantum.asp

< D-Wave patterns an array of loops of low-temperature superconductors such 
as aluminum and niobium onto a chip. When electricity flows through them, 
the loops act like tiny magnets. Two refrigerator magnets will naturally 
flip so that they stick together, minimizing the energy between them. The 
loops in D-Wave's chip behave similarly, "flipping" the direction of 
current flow from clockwise to counterclockwise to minimize the magnetic 
flux between them. Depending on the problem it's meant to tackle, the chip 
is programmed so that current flows through each loop in a particular 
direction. The loops then spontaneously flip until they reach a stable 
energy state, which represents the solution to the problem.

D-Wave's first computer won't be able to accomplish the most widely touted 
payoff of quantum computing: factoring the extremely large numbers at the 
heart of modern cryptographic systems exponentially faster than any known 
computer. It will, however, be ideally suited to solving problems like the 
infamous traveling-salesman problem, in which a salesman searches for the 
optimal route among cities. As their complexity grows, such problems 
quickly become intractable for traditional computers because they require 
investigating every possible answer. In searching for its own optimal 
energy state, D-Wave's chip performs exactly this type of calculation 
automatically, in seconds. >

This strikes me as interestingly similar to the attractor design of 
Hopfield nets. Might be promising as the substrate of a method of learning 
and thinking that doesn't require precise algorithms.

Of course, some maverick theorists have already suggested that mind and 
choice arise from quantum tunnelling in the brain.

Damien Broderick