Will Your Future Computer Be A Quantum Computer? Qubits are coming and you will need a quantum computer to access them. What is the next step in computing? Is it joining together super computers to make a super super computer? The more cores or central processing units a computer has the more powerful it is, but the more energy it requires. The advances in computing hardware have been quick to come. When the first home computers came out which actually used a fairly decent operating system the computers had a central processing unit with one core. A computer core is the processing unit which receives and processes instructions. Processors can have multiple cores and usually a home computer has a maximum of 8 cores, but some central processing units can have even more. The advantage to more than one core is the fact each core can process instructions at the same time. If I would have told someone when home computers first came out they would have multiple cores I might have been laughed at. At the time home computers came out many thought these computers would just get more powerful as the years went by and they were correct to a certain extent. What none of us thought of was the fact a different type of computer would take over some day. Work began years ago on a computer which operated using bits on the atomic scale. Right now, this is about as small as we can go, but the process of making a quantum computer is extremely difficult. It is difficult, because the laws of nature are different in many ways when we work with these tiny objects. We have to figure out how to isolate the atoms we are using without touching them. That is if we use atoms. In this case each atom would be a Qubit. While our standard computers can work with an incredible number of bits, the most qubits we have been able to work with in a quantum computer is 50 as of the writing of this article. Even thought this might sound anemic to many, we have just used a quantum computer to solve a problem no traditional computer could. The problem was how would 50 atoms react if one bounced into another. This may not sound impressive, but scientists tell us they would never have been able to get an answer to this problem using a traditional supercomputer. A quantum computer built today would not be very useful to the average person. The irony here is that a traditional computer could solve most ordinary problems we run into and the quantum computer would look alien to us and be almost impossible for us to use. I shouldn’t even use the word almost, I should say it would be impossible. We are on the verge of the development of quantum computers which many computer scientists claim would be able to protect websites and programs from hacking, because the encryption they create could not be broken. You have to excuse me, but I am a little skeptical about this, since I have heard this so many times before in regard to things like government encryptions and yet, quite a few were broken. There is always the unknown factor, something no one has thought of yet. Anyway, China claims to have sent a message from a satellite using a quantum computer and it is said to be unhackable. Even though just about everyone is thinking about perfecting quantum computers, there are a few scientists looking past quantum computing. One has to wonder how this would happen when quantum computers have so far to go, but it is happening. There is a scientist at MIT who thinks quantum computing will lead to quark-scale computing. Here is what that scientist said. "The ultimate level of miniaturization allowed by physical law is apparently the Planck scale, a billion billion billion times smaller than the current computational scale." Quarks are the basic components of a hadron. A hadron is an elementary particle that is subject to what is known as the strong interaction. Let me put it simply, a quark is far smaller than an atom. We are already on a similar path to miniaturization with quantum computing which we were on with traditional computing. What I mean is some scientists are looking for a way to make even smaller computers than quantum computers. Will we land up harnessing the smallest particles in the universe to do this? If we keep heading this way someday we may be able to create computers so small one might need a microscope to see them, yet they would be far more powerful than the biggest supercomputer today. This is the same thing which happened with traditional computers. The early ones which filled rooms with their equipment are nothing compared to our cell phones which are really small computers. We have to remember what we are working with all comes from our tiny corner of the universe. There might be other material out in space or on other planets which would make our computers far more efficient. Heck there might even be smaller particles yet to be discovered right here on earth. We shouldn’t discount the fact we could discover something even smaller we could use, we might even invent something someday. Years ago, we were told we would not be able to make computer processors for traditional computers any smaller in a couple of years, but we kept finding ways to do it anyway. New processes were invented and they kept us humming along. We have gotten to the point where what we own is probably more than most of us need, so advances in computing will benefit industry and the military more than us. Indirectly it could benefit us though. We could discover new cures for disease, more efficient ways to travel and many other things which would benefit our lives. There are those who believe the first person to actually build a quantum computer which can harness a decent number of qubits will be able to conquer space and perhaps the world. Wouldn’t it be great if we could use one of these computers to develop a way to render all the earth’s nuclear weapons inoperative? That might be the best use for a quantum computer if it could be done. |
