Quantum Computing at University of California, Santa Barbara
What if the Feynman concept of the quantum computing could be utilized in solving a large world problem? What would it be? What is the question?
As the components of computers become smaller and smaller, we are approaching the limit in which quantum effects
become important. One might ask whether this is a problem or an opportunity.
Station Q at UCSB is one of the research facilities that is investigating this kind of computation capabilities. The investigation is being funded by Microsoft and is quite advanced. In combination with the NanoTechnology research as well an excellent student population, UCSB like all of the UC campuses is doing impressive work in the science of computation.
How does this impact your efforts as a developer or someone getting started in software? Over the past decades, computer hardware and thereby software were constrained under the concept of Moore’s law. Moore’s Law stated that computing power would double overtime and used the graph shown here.
The question that Station Q at UCSB is working on is how to keep the computation ability improving and one of the ways is through quantum computing.
A good abstract of the research work can be found at:
If you want to read the full article, and just reading the words, not worrying about the equations, is worthwhile. The link:
If you want to read about Feynman’s early thoughts on Quantum Computing you will have to buy the book:
What kind of big world problem would this solve? Factorization of large numbers, this is an important part of Mathematical research. Search, think what kinds of medical improvements could be made cheaply if genome searches of combinations could be accomplished at thousand of times faster than with today’s technology.
Interesting work, check it out.