You’d be surprised about how little the average programmer knows regarding how a computer works at a physical level. Programming is generally a very abstract, high-level activity, and you don’t really need to know what’s going on in the computer itself. It’s usually not particularly helpful (though there are many programming tasks, undoubtedly, that do benefit from such knowledge).
I myself have only the most basic understanding of the physical functioning of a computer – how high-level algorithms are reducible to a physical level. I’ve been into programming for a while, and that was always a deep curiosity of mine: how does it really work? If I were thrown back in time to, say, 1902, I might, maybe, have enough knowledge of the physical aspect of computing to use existent technology to help build a rudimentary computer. Maybe.
Quantum computing is being talked about more and more. I know (to some degree) how the logic gates in modern computers work, but I have no clue about quantum computing. I don’t know what a logic gate is, what it looks like, how it works, at any level in quantum computing. I don’t even know if ‘logic gate’ is an appropriate term to use (though I’m pretty sure it is).
Quantum computing is supposed to be a whole lot faster than our binary computing. I’m not sure if that means it’s faster all the time, or faster only for specific types of problems. There’s a paper coming out soon about how much faster quantum computing is for specific computing problems.
I can relate and sympathized with that mental block in trying to mesh hardware with software. I went through that phase back in the 70’s. I had learned the hardware from vacuum tubes, to transistors, to ICs, to ALUs, to CPUs and could also write HEX and assembly code in software. But despite all of that, my little brain just had a hell of a time trying to clearly see how the software, perhaps adding two numbers, was physically operating. Eventually, it all clicked and I haven’t had any trouble since, but it took some cognitive dissonance for a while.
In my current work, I am dealing with horrendously large amounts of data and simultaneous equations. I’m very familiar with intelligence schemes and resolving issues based upon probabilistic calculations (QM). But despite that, the whole “quantum computing” thing appears to me to be a fog that is being made into far more than it really is (typical of this age). I am aware of specific military and government applications involving encryption, but as far as anything else, it seems to me that it is really just calling “statistical gating” by a fancier name so as to promote it more pridefully.
I might actually be already doing what they are talking about as far as I can tell. I deal with matrices of 200,000 simultaneous equations that would normally take a month to resolve with the fastest computers on the planet. But I worked out what I call “Afflate Analysis” so as to let me resolve that matrix in minutes on merely my PC. It uses something similar to a “quantum analysis on virtual particles” technique, so maybe it is similar to what they are talking about. I can’t really tell. It is hard to separate the reality from the promotional bullshit these days.
Well, anything computable on a Quantum Computer is in principle computable on a normal computer – it’s not magic, it’s just faster for some purposes. And when I say ‘some purposes’, I really need to stress that: there’s not much evidence that I’m aware of that it’s faster for all purposes, or even purposes that the average PC user would need. I’ve only seen quantum computing played up in the realms of specific computational problems, usually so specific that only a very small amount of people or organizations would benefit from it (again, as far as I can tell). They’ve not even developed anything resembling an operating system for quantum computers yet, so it’s far far away from general use, if it’s even appropriate for general use in the first place.
I probably have nothing to add that you don’t already know about but I wonder why you would think that quantum computing would be able to everything a normal computer could do. I would think it would actually be able to even run all exisitng software, Windows etc.
Tell me if I’m wrong but then fundamental part of computing is the transistors, closed being 1 open being 0.
I don’t know exactly what quantum computing implies, whether it just uses very small transistors or if it replaces the transistors by some sort of charge in a molecule atome or particle, then for each given particle if has a positive charge it’s 1 if negative 0. Then who knows how they would connect them being that it doesn’t seem realistic to have wires that are only an atomic in width.
But, let’s just say it’s transistors near the moleclar level, perhaps each transistor only consisting of 10-100 molecules. I don’t know the details of how they would make them, but it seems they would build the smallest robot arms possible by hand and then it would build and even smaller one and so on until they have a robot that can build the transistors etc.
The process of development would be similar to the way it’s computations would be accesible. When one sends input (keyboard, mouse, etc.) to the quantum processor the amplitude would ahve to be dramatically reduced first, because even the lightest touch of a key would create more amplitude than the quantum processor could handle. Then after the processor finshes it’s command it will send a signal that would ahve to be dramatically amped up in order for it affect the circuitry that controls the output (screen display, sound). So where is the limitations besides perhaps a lag time due to the reducing of the amplitude and the increasing of it?
I don’t think that a quantum computer wouldn’t be able to do everything a normal computer can do. Are you addressing this to James or me?
Quantum Computing uses a different system. It’s no longer as simple as 1s and 0s.
It seems like you’re just trying to guess how quantum computers work, assuming that it’s fundamentally the same as normal computing but…smaller.
That’s mistaken.
Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by ‘fundamentally’, but you did seem to imply the 1s and 0s approach to modern computing is a fundamental part, so that’s one fundamental difference. The logic gates, if you can call them that, in Quantum Computing work quite differently. I don’t know how exactly they work, but I know it’s not just 1s and 0s at play anymore. My understanding is that there are 4 possible states instead of 2, but I could be wrong about that. I do know for sure that it’s not 1s and 0s though.
That’s interesting that there would be four possible states. Either way, 1s and 0s and so forth means it’s digital, I wonder if they could make an analog or in some way more ‘organic system of computing’? But don’t mind me I really don’t know much about all this.
The strange thing is that the current quantum chips only process some calculations faster, not all, the producers can’t tell excatly how it works either, so it’s very strange and seems like mumbojumbo, specially when all through my childhood I’ve been told that these quantum computers would solve all (in regards to calculation speed, and now they’r seem to be quite slow).
I think it is supposed to make use of particles having different states at once, thus not merely representing either 1 or 0 but several values at once. But since this different-states-at-once quality is a statistical rather than an actual, physical quality, the term “statistical gating” sounds appropriate, even though I don’t know how that actually works.
We have seen some quantum computing in action in nature. What was considered random, was shown to not possibly be random, because ‘choices’ were made too fast, way too fast.
Moreno, let me get this straight - that article seems to describe how the mechanism isn’t actually completely passive and coincidental, but relatively active, thus much more subtle, a product of much more selection and thus much more accurately selective - i.e. selective on a much earlier stage, closer to the surface. Which seems less than miraculous given that the most proactive process is the most effective and thus survives others.
When it says “several states at once” it seem to mean that the light is first absorbed into a kind of energy-plasma before it takes the path to conversion into susbtance. If quantumcomputing is indeed analogous to this process I can see the merits.
Well, as one lay person to Another, yes, that is a fair description. Though in a sense the organism is doing quantum computing, it’s not simply an analogy. It is a very specific, single computation of all possible routes at once.
That is an apt description. Although “in parallel” is more often true.
We have to be careful of what things are called these days, seldom really being what they are named.
The word “Quantum” basically means “to be highly respected mental magic”, from the Quantum Magi.
Although originally meant merely “stepped sizes or portions”.
First, quantum computing does not compute all possible computations. A quantum computer can only produce a result with a very limited amount of information and it cannot report on all possible paths, just one path. Once someone actually builds a quantum computer with multiple pathways (and it’s not clear that this has been done), then this physical object may make use of a wave-function that covers a number of routes to produce a result that we can only do by working through, by hand, all the results until we then combine the results. But both the quantum computer and our work by hand are far different from working through a number of computations all at once.
Second, photosynthesis is simply a physical process, no computation is involved. This process may make use of the same processes that we would like to use in a a quantum computer, but that doesn’t make it a computation. No numbers are involved in photosynthesis. Without numbers, there is no computation.
As much as I hate to have to agree with PhysBang on anything, he is right about all of that.
Back in my CPU design days, I would have the hardware fetch a number from memory, add it to the prior number, subtract it from the prior number, multiply by the prior number and divide it by the prior number all simultaneously so that the next instruction fetch could simply choose which operation to use without having to take the time to tell the processor which operation and wait for its execution. Doing that as a part of the pipelining, and a few other tricks, produced the fastest commercial LSTTL 32 bit processor on the market back in 1978-9. A year or two later Fairchild was doing the same kinds of things in their 68020 processor line, but within a single chip.
So even though many possible operations (“paths”) are being done simultaneously, only one gets chosen to be used. Although if the pipeline doesn’t merely stop with a single operation, but rather continues with other presumptuous calculations in tandem, even greater speed can be obtained because of not having to tell the processor which operation you want before it has already done it.
I really don’t know if that is what they are calling “quantum computation” or not. The word “Quantum” years ago became a label to call something if you wanted to sell it. The idea was to promote “sudden changes” throughout society as a social engineering tool.
I could not find a quotation from Flemming in that article.
Note that the actual title of the article by Flemming et al. is “Evidence for wavelike energy transfer through quantum coherence in photosynthetic systems”, nothing about quantum computing there. In the article, the authors write, “In the presence of quantum coherence transfer, such an operation is analogous to Grover’s algorithm…”
This seems to be another case of pop science distorting the reality of the research. I can understand the desire to add a little boost to one’s story.