Well a company called D-Wave Systems has sold the first "quantum computer". There is speculation as to whether it really is a true quantum computer or not, as details are not really available on the technology the company has supposedly created. Quantum computers have been in development for a LONG time but have not been anywhere close to viable as of yet. When reading up on them a couple of years ago, quantum computers were only at best 4% accurate in its processing calculations and still pretty slow. Im sure performance is better today, but no one really can say that quantum technology definitely is ready to be used or not. The first commercial quantum computer was bought for $10,000,000.00 by the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Exact details about the computer and the transaction dont seem to be available other than the total sum. Quantum computer is different from normal computers. It does not use silicon with electrons flowing through it, and gates and transistors, and blah blah blah going on. Normal processors store information as either a 0 or a 1. This is what digital is. Either on, or off. Quantum computers instead harness the power of quantum physics to store information as qubits. This word literally means "quantum bit", it is the equivalent of a modern computers "bit" (1 or 0) in quantum form. However, the physical structure of a quantum computer is basically a large entanglement of atoms (not a bunch of bits with 1s or 0s), and a qubit is the representation of the state of the memory as well as the state of the systems entanglement. The crazy part about a qubit is that is can be a "0", a "1" or it can be both at the same time! Here, I will quote Wikipedia to try and help me better describe what a qubit is and how quantum computing works: The chip inside this first computer is a 128-bit design. There is no info on it available. In simple terms so most of you can understand it, imagine a quantum computer chip as a processor you have now. Now imagine that instead of running at 2.5GHz like yours currently does, it runs instead at 10,000,000,000 GHz. That would be like the performance of a simple quantum computer. Now on to pictures! This first picture is of the actual 128-bit quantum computer chip that is in the computer that was sold: These next pictures as of the old 16-bit chip from a few years ago: And now its late, so if I forgot anything I will follow up tomorrow.
And Lockheed Martin got it. Makes you wonder what the hell they want to develop with it. -cue doomsday device reference-
But they bought it for only $10 million. That is really cheap compared to anything the company does. A single F-35C costs something like $140 million. My guess would be the company is interested in learning about programing for this type of computer initially, so that they are the only company with the edge when these become more common. It is also possible that Lockheed Martin is interested in designing encryption algorithms or the breaking of. Did the first post make enough sense? It is kinda hard to try and explain the mechanics of quantum technology for computer use when your tired at 1am :/
Pretty sure the 128-bit part here is just the traditional silicon part of the chip. Last I heard the best anyone had got out of a quantum processor was 9-10 qubits, and I'm not sure how usable it was for practical purposes. As I understand it they can't be used in isolation anyway since the algorithms generate non-deterministic results - specifically multiple results - you need a conventional processor to verify which is the right one. That's still good enough to crack RSA encryption in close to linear time, but it might not be so useful for everyday tasks.
More importantly, Lockheed Martin is the second largest defense contractor in the world. Responsible for fighters, bombers, ballistic missiles, radar systems etc... I find it unlikely that NSA or NRO would just let Lockheed Martin take it without using it for their own purposes first. I mean they're only responsible for electronic intelligence gathering for the entire country, NBD
Maybe. but as this computer is designed to work best in things like pattern recognition and systems like that, it is entirely possible that Lockheed Martin is interested in designing a system for something like facial recognition, friend or foe systems, and the like that cannot be hacked or broken as easily as a modern computer system, due to the fact that the inner workings are entirely different and the programing language isnt like anything else. Ill post more info when I get home about this computer, what it is designed to do, limitations, how this differs from a true quantum computer system, and anything else I can think of.
Having read "Programming the Universe" I find this pretty exciting. Half the book is about quantum computers