...Doesn't he have a ton of tiny glass bits all over his yard now?

That was my immediate take as well. "Don't worry about it old people (in that it's an AARP video), everything's going to be A-OK!"

Bangladesh, eh? Back to the drawing board...

I love the last (non-commercial) line. Such a sunny disposition on this guy.

Liked it overall, but that image of the ocean at the beginning with "Ta-da! The Internet." No, fucking... what? That isn't "The Internet" at all, it's water. You'd think they knew better, given that they then go on to give actually engaging detail about internet infrastructure.

That was far more interesting than I would have expected. I'd say I want to do that, but I don't know that I could handle being down in one of those holes.

Looked into ordering some to do the droplets thing myself, and you can get 16oz on Amazon for about $24. According to some comments, it's good for lubricating treadmills. And silencers.

Oh, so all we need is an impossible material. Obviously!

I was hoping for more meat to his presentation, and was disappointed. I feel that he said absolutely nothing to help anyone in the audience understand what quantum computers actually DO or what sort of problems they'll help to solve. They'll absolutely not increase your FPS, as that's not what they're well-suited to do. What they are quite excellent at is taking a problem with many possible solutions and finding the correct (or best) one at an extremely high speed.

One example would be the Traveling Salesman problem. In brief, find the optimum route for traversing a number of points on a map. This is useful for things like scheduling package delivery routes, airline flights, etc. With a classic / current computer we write software that cleverly chugs through the possible solutions, throws out any that prove to be poor, and eventually gets to what appears to be the best or is at least a "good enough" solution. As the number of necessary points to be visited increases this problem scales in complexity quickly, so eventually a current computer would just choke on the problem and at best return an ok-ish solution in a reasonable period of time.

A quantum computer is a totally different beast. If it's "big" enough (IE, is comprised of a sufficient number of qubits), it takes the entire set of all possible solutions to the problem, and rather than iterate through them to find the best one, it checks them all simultaneously and immediately returns the optimum solution. It does this by using properties of quantum mechanics, and I think this is where the speaker was drawing his talk of parallel universes. If there are 3 qubits, they would exist as 000, 001, 010, 011, 100, 101, 110, and 111 simultaneously. The software would then define what the best answer would look like, and the computer returns the answer.

You can hopefully see how this totally breaks encryption. With a current computer and a long enough encryption key, an encoded message would take the fastest machines a huge number of years to decipher. With a quantum computer you hand it a gibberish encrypted message, it loads all possible transformations of that message simultaneously, and it then returns the transformation which looks most like a coherent message.

I'm excited to see what these machines can do for us, but they're going to necessitate some significant structural changes in how we handle sensitive data.

Wonderful video, thanks for posting it.

Thank you, that was fascinating and gave me a newfound appreciation for the species!

Better than having the amusement park *in* the treatment plant though. -1 for sea pig.

>> ^CaptainPlanet:
if we covered texas in these, could we solve the energy crisis?


I'm reasonably certain that solar panels would be massively more efficient, albeit not nearly as fun to watch.