The Raelian Movement
for those who are not afraid of the future : http://www.rael.org
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Quantum computers a step closer to reality thanks to new finding
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-11/icl-qca110910.php
Nov, 9th, 2010
Quantum computers may be much easier to build than previously thought,
suggests a new study in Physical Review Letters
Quantum computers should be much easier to build than previously
thought, because they can still work with a large number of faulty or
even missing components, according to a study published today in
Physical Review Letters. This surprising discovery brings scientists
one step closer to designing and building real-life quantum computing
systems – devices that could have enormous potential across a wide
range of fields, from drug design, electronics, and even
code-breaking.
Scientists have long been fascinated with building computers that work
at a quantum level – so small that the parts are made of just single
atoms or electrons. Instead of 'bits', the building blocks normally
used to store electronic information, quantum systems use quantum bits
or 'qubits', made up of an arrangement of entangled atoms.
Materials behave very differently at this tiny scale compared to what
we are used to in our everyday lives – quantum particles, for example,
can exist in two places at the same time. "Quantum computers can
exploit this weirdness to perform powerful calculations, and in
theory, they could be designed to break public key encryption or
simulate complex systems much faster than conventional computers,"
said Dr Sean Barrett, the lead author of the study, who is a Royal
Society University Research Fellow in the Department of Physics at
Imperial College London.
The machines have been notoriously hard to build, however, and were
thought to be very fragile to errors. In spite of considerable buzz in
the field in the last 20 years, useful quantum computers remain
elusive.
Barrett and his colleague Dr. Thomas Stace, from the University of
Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, have now found a way to correct for
a particular sort of error, in which the qubits are lost from the
computer altogether. They used a system of 'error-correcting' code,
which involved looking at the context provided by the remaining qubits
to decipher the missing information correctly.
"Just as you can often tell what a word says when there are a few
missing letters, or you can get the gist of a conversation on a
badly-connected phone line, we used this idea in our design for a
quantum computer," said Dr Barrett. They discovered that the computers
have a much higher threshold for error than previously thought – up to
a quarter of the qubits can be lost – but the computer can still be
made to work. "It's surprising, because you wouldn't expect that if
you lost a quarter of the beads from an abacus that it would still be
useful," he added.
The findings indicate that quantum computers may be much easier to
build than previously thought, but as the results are still based on
theoretical calculations, the next step is to actually demonstrate
these ideas in the lab. Scientists will need to devise a way for
scaling the computers to a sufficiently large number of qubits to be
viable, says Barrett. At the moment the biggest quantum computers
scientists have built are limited to just two or three qubits.
"We are still some way off from knowing what the true potential of a
quantum computer might be, says Barrett. "At the moment quantum
computers are good at particular tasks, but we have no idea what these
systems could be used for in the future," he said. "They may not
necessarily be better for everything, but we just don't know. They may
be better for very specific things that we find impossible now."
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"Ethics" is simply a last-gasp attempt by deist conservatives and
orthodox dogmatics to keep humanity in ignorance and obscurantism,
through the well tried fermentation of fear, the fear of science and
new technologies.
There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history,
it is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.
On the contrary, let us embrace Science and the new technologies
unfettered, for it is these which will liberate mankind from the
myth of god, and free us from our age old fears, from disease,
death and the sweat of labour.
Rael
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