Thank you for that article from the Times.
nytimes.com
"The machine at Los Alamos has been enlisted on a recent morning for a grander purpose: to carry out an experiment in quantum computing. By using radio waves to manipulate atoms like so many quantum abacus beads, the Los Alamos scientists will coax a molecule called crotonic acid into executing a simple computer program.
Last year they set a record, carrying out a calculation involving seven atoms. This year they are shooting for 10. That may not sound like many.
Each atom can be thought of as a little switch, a register that holds a 1 or a 0, and the latest Pentium chip contains 42 million such devices. But the paradoxical laws of quantum mechanics confer a powerful advantage: a single atom can do two calculations at once. Two atoms can do four, three atoms can do eight.
By the time you reach 10, doubling and doubling and doubling along the way, you have an invisibly tiny computer that can carry out 1,024 (210) calculations at the same time.
If scientists can find ways to leverage this achievement to embrace 20 atoms, they will be able to execute a million simultaneous calculations. Double that again to 40 atoms, and 10 trillion calculations can be done in tandem.
The goal, still but a distant glimmer, is to harness thousands of atoms, resulting in a machine so powerful that it would easily break codes now considered impenetrable and solve other problems that are impossible for even the fastest supercomputer.
"We are at the border of a new territory," said Dr. Raymond Laflamme, one of the leaders of the Los Alamos project. "All the experiments today are a very small step, but they show that there is not a wall."
"The big question," he added, "is whether we can make the transition from theory to practice."
The program that he and a colleague, Dr. Emanuel Knill, are now running — a procedure for detecting and correcting the errors that inevitably crop up during the exceedingly delicate quantum calculations — is being watched with interest by other theorists."
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"Less than a decade ago, quantum computing was just an intellectual parlor game, a way for theorists to test their mettle by imagining absurdly small computers with parts the size of individual atoms. At its root, computation is just a matter of shuffling bits, the 1's and 0's of binary arithmetic. So suppose an atom pointing up means 1 and an atom pointing down means 0. Flip around these bits by zapping the atoms with laser beams or radio waves and the result is an extremely tiny computer.
But that would be just the beginning of its power. Quantum mechanics, the rules governing subatomic particles, dictates that these quantum bits, called qubits (pronounced KYEW-bits), can also be in a "superposition," indicating 1 and 0 at the same time. Two atoms can simultaneously be in four states: 00, 01, 10 and 11. Three atoms can say eight things at once: 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110 and 111. For each atom added to the chain, the number of possibilities increases exponentially, by a power of 2. Put together a few dozen atoms, it seemed, and they could perform vast numbers of calculations simultaneously."
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"The powerful field is emanating from the supercooled superconducting magnets inside a tanklike machine called a nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer.
The device itself is unremarkable. N.M.R. machines are used in chemistry labs across the world to map the architecture of molecules by sensing how their atoms dance to the beat of electromagnetic waves. Hospitals and clinics use the same technology, called magnetic resonance imaging, or M.R.I., to scan the tissues of the human body."
FWIW
Something I read this past weekend said that M.R.I. technology used in reverse was the center of our U.S. government experimentation 50 years ago, and that what we know as todays M.R.I. was actually discovered in that time era but was sat on by the US government for some reasons that I wont go into at this time. |
