Mark Ketchen, manager of the Physics Information Group at IBM's Watson Center in Yorktown, N.Y., doesn't even try to hide his excitement. "It's not going to be tomorrow, but it's not going to be 50 years," he told me this morning.
He was talking about the quantum computer, that fabled nonpareil of reckoning machines, first described by theoretical physicists in the 1980s, but highly resistant to physical development.
The basic principles of quantum computing are relatively easy to understand (anything beyond the basic principles gets fantastically complicated, very quickly). Classic computer bits have a binary function: They can be flipped either to 0 or 1. Quantum bits (or "qubits"), thanks to a phenomenon of quantum mechanics called "superpositioning," can be in more than one state at the same time.
For each qubit added to the computational fabric, the number of possible states is doubled. Think of the old story of the king who was duped into offering offering a supplicant one grain of rice on the first square of the chess board, two on the second... soon finding he'd given away all the rice in his kingdom.
Multiplying qubits generates an exponential explosion in computing power. A quantum computer could crack in seconds an encryption algorithm that would take years for the most powerful classic computer to break.
So far, so theoretical. The problem has been actually building a quantum computer that works. While it's possible to create actual, physical qubits, they display a tendency to "decohere" very rapidly -- think nanoseconds -- losing their superpositional capability before they can perform calculations.
As Mark Ketchen told me, with an increasing number of scientists around the world working on this problem over the last 10 years, a threshold has now been reached where qubits can maintain stability long enough "that error correction starts to become possible."
There are competing models for qubit stability, but last month IBM "set a stake in the ground," Ketchen said, by using superconducting qubits, housed at extremely low temperatures (hundreds of degrees below zero) to set new records for retaining integrity and correcting data.
Understand, we are still talking about a very limited model. IBM achieved these new standards of performance using only a three-qubit chip. Ketchen, however, says the team will soon be working on an eight-qubit unit, and he finds a 30-qubit unit foreseeable.
It's been estimated that 250 qubits could hold more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe. The engineering challenge is to scale the model without reintroducing instability.
The obvious application of quantum computing -- and one that is driving interest from governments and investors -- lies in the exponential increase in the speed of factoring. There is also the prospect of generating new, near-invincible quantum passwords.
Ketchen is personally excited about the chances of also using this exponential power to create molecular simulation at the quantum level, but he admits this is a niche interest. As for practical, enterprise applications, the challenge is to identify the crossover when investment in quantum computing is justified over super-powerful classic computing.
He's surely right, however, that once the capability is there, applications will present themselves. His example is the cryptanalysis used to break the "Enigma" code in World War 2. Nobody understood at the time the commercial value for future design of cryptographic algorithms and protocols.
Nevertheless, it's easy to anticipate the heft quantum computing would bring to analytics, optimization challenges, and especially to sorting and configuring unstructured data on distributed databases of any dimensions. Image recognition, medical imaging, modeling global climate change -- the possible uses are endless.
Not that every business is going to buy a quantum computer: As Ketchen says, nobody is looking to put one under every desk. He's counting, rather, on a centralized model, where institutions and enterprises could have Internet access to quantum resources.
It's hard to overstate how remarkable it is that Ketchen can talk about the availability of commercial quantum computing, maybe 20 to 25 years from now. "The game isn't over yet," he cautioned, "but we've come many orders of magnitude already. It's no longer a real distant dream."
While the science eludes me, the prospects of this kind of breakaway computing are mind-boggling, The impact on the World Wide Web, for instance; and the advancement of a cloud model that requires only "thin clients" to access. The implications for human knowledge are staggering.
And while no one can predict how it will all play out specifically, it is worthwhile casting a glance at the general direction in which things are moving.
Thanks for all the comments. I agree with Jabailo that conceptualizing this development requires putting aside our conventional thinking about computing. Indeed, quantum mechanics, on which this is based, defies classical logic. As for qubits being in two contradictory states at once, yes, it's the famous Schroedinger's cat paradox. Here's a brief statement, for anyone who's interested.
It's amazing to find that this actually has practical application!
Since Quantum Computing No Longer a 'Distant Dream' should we start worrying about our passwords...?
Sunita, I think you have a few years before you need to start worrying, but yes - quantum computing will ultimately signal the end of passwords as we know them. Certainly, it poses a challenge to the RSA algorithm.
"Unfortunately, this is sort of like asking Charles Babbage, who drew up the first blueprints for a general-purpose computer in the 1830s, whether his contraption would be hitting store shelves by the 1840s or the 1850s. Could Babbage have foreseen the specific technologies — the vacuum tube and transistor — that would make his vision a reality more than a century later? Today's quantum computing researchers are in a similar bind. They have a compelling blueprint for a new type of computer, one that could, in seconds, solve certain problems that would probably take eons for today's fastest supercomputers. But some of the required construction materials don't yet exist."
So in a nutshell, we don't have the requisite construction materials as of yet. So how does this correlate with what IBM is doing?
"Not that every business is going to buy a quantum computer: As Ketchen says, nobody is looking to put one under every desk. He's counting, rather, on a centralized model, where institutions and enterprises could have Internet access to quantum resources."
That's so true especially when one quantum computer is reportedly going for the ridiculous price of $10 million.
Nevertheless, it is a very significant development as far scientific research and advancement is concern. We are in dire need of ridiculously higher computer powers and speeds.
Today's computers rely on semiconductor technology that have served us for decades. But they do have their limits and the alternatives might be optical computing and quantum computing that can help to solve the trickiest computation problems that stump today's computers
Quantum bits (or "qubits") are as simple as 0, 1. WOW very simple indeed. But can't understand how an assertion can be "true" and "false" at the same time. I might need a quantum brain to understand that.
"1. Quantum bits (or "qubits"), thanks to a phenomenon of quantum mechanics called "superpositioning," can be in more than one state at the same time."
thank you for taking the crook out of my neck and evaporating my headache!
When I think about how quantum "computing" works, it doesn't seem like "computing" at all. For example, the way that it looks for values in a database seems more like using a tuning fork to find items with similar resonance...so for lack of a better term, I call it simply "quantum".
Probably the biggest barrier to quantum will be resetting the human mind to deal with it. Right now we have this mental image of a factory where we put inputs in and an assembly line processes it and out pops an answer. Quantum is nothing like that (as far as I've read). Quantum is more the way we think...where there is always a complex state, and a multiplicity of change.
I'd say the best way to prepare for quantum is to un-learn what we now hold true.
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Hospitality is one industrial sector making big strides in deploying analytics to enhance customer experience. We heard about it last week on IE Radio, in discussion with Todd Davis of Choice Hotels. I recently learned from IHG's Director of Revenue Optimization, Dev Koushik, about how analytics can be used to set optimal room prices across 700,000 rooms in nearly 5,000 properties.
The big announcement at the opening keynotes of IBM's 2013 Smarter Commerce Global Summit is that IBM is putting Watson into companies, and companies are putting Watson to work.
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The New York Times made a fuss about the obvious this week, as it so often does, pointing out that Hollywood increasingly leverages big-data to select and hone movie scripts.
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Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit in Monaco kicked into high gear today, and we've already begun to see news emerging from that lovely city-state by the sea.
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