The man is quantum himself: bald, bespectacled nerd and pony-tailed rebel AT THE SAME TIME.

Good stuff. Now they need to do some *documentaries on his annoying laugh.

Adding video to channels (Documentaries) - requested by MarineGunrock.

great...a new way to look at porn on the internet.

That laugh is known as the Stoner Giggle.

Doing "this" and "that" at the same time is just affecting the speed of computations and higher level decisions. It does not affect the way decisions are being made. As I understand it, all this new physics talks about infinite possibilities occuring simultaneously. That's not what software is designed to do. It doesn't solve all permutations of events it's concerned with, it (by design) culls out the invalid possibilities and deals with those that are possible. So, there may be speed advances here but nothing more. But, then again, what do I know, I'm just a Rottweiler.

Sort of Rotty... The idea is that with an array of qubits you can calculate all the possible outcomes of a given scenario, faster that any other method because you can exploit the nature of decisions. In a binary world, we store information as yes or no, in a quantum world things are superpositions of yes and no (think of it as yes, no, maybe yes, maybe no and everything in between).

You are probably now supremely confused, but like my electrodynamics professor I will plow ahead... So what is stopping quantum computing? Why if this guy makes it seem like a reality is it not on the market yet?

Ah, this is a good question. The biggest problem confronting quantum computing is coherence times. Or in other words, the time a state can be represented as either a yes, no, or superposition thereof is quantum mechanically limited, because of thermal fluctations and other details, which I will not elaborate on. The reality is that quantum computing is coming a long, but don't expect anything for while... a long while.

My understanding of using qbits in computing is that they would perform a similar role to the role that the log table does in a conventional system, but with theoretically much greater precision, and with lookup options which are absurd in a conventional system.

For instance you could use your qbits to "lookup" the prime factors of a very large (>1kbit) number, this has significant (counter)cryptographic applications, and is functionally impossible with current technology/mathematics.

This quantum computer looks like a keg. So I have to ask: would it be possible to really have a quantum keg? With quantum beer? With quantum beer that allows me to be drunk and sober at the SAME TIME?

That'd put me on top of my game at a party.

"The man is quantum himself: bald, bespectacled nerd and pony-tailed rebel AT THE SAME TIME."

Possibly the one and only upvote that I will ever give to quantumushroom.

And yes, it hurt.

rottenseed: LOL!

rougy: LOL!

Actually that "quantum computer" is a Nuclear Magnetic Resonance spectrometer, or NMR. It's used to look at the structure of molecules - there's no "quantum calculation" behind it at all. These things have existed since 1950's.

Have I mentioned lately that I love you guys?

So, the big silver thing is a dewar. It most likely contains liquid helium.

I am not sure how much NMR has to do with it, but there are NMR based qubits...The decoherence term, which came from NMR, is the same effect, but not actually the same phenomenon that is going on here, I don't think.

Most quantum qubits that I have heard of are made out of low temperature(Type I) superconductors, like niobium. The qubit itself is a Josephson Junction, which is a entirely too long discussion to go into too much detail.

But the basic idea is that if you get two superconductors close together, but separated by an insulator, they will quantum mechanically link. So the state of one describes the state of the other(e.g. entanglement).

*Warning, a more technical explanation is below.

You can exploit this entanglement and by systematically rocking the potential that describes the coupling between the two states with a microwave signal. Eventually you can get the system into the ground state. Now the flux quanta which couples the two systems, exist as discreet energy levels. By injecting that flux into the system, you excite the system into it's first energy eigenstate. At this point the system is effectively described by the Bloch equation. This two state system is your quantum qubit. Which you can use to make calculations, the easiest of which and first test is to factor numbers or seek prime numbers. The problem, as I alluded to earlier, is that as the system evolves in time some of the energy escapes into other energy eigenstates, it is no longer |Q>=a|1>+b|0> but now it is |Q>=a|1>+b|0>+c|2>... and so on. The time the state can be described by |1> and |0> is referred to as the coherence time.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephson_junction
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computer

How was that rbar?

mycroft...are you making up words and putting them in random order again?

^ LOL. What part confused you? It seems perfectly clear to me.

hmmm, if we start computing on a molecular level, wouldn't that mean someone could create a virus that also disrupts molecular level computations, perhaps asploding the earf?

Wormstrum!!

I imagine that was one of two things; either you are referencing to something or you are really high and have no idea what you are talking about. Please explain...

Worsmtrum is Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth's nemesis in Futurama.

Oh, I was talking about the "molecular level" comment.

Ah, I see. Yeah, when cannabinoid receptors are stimulated you can say quite interesting non sequiturs regarding the "earf"

*engineering

Adding video to channels (Engineering) - requested by oxdottir.

Man o man... At the APS so many people were using coplanar waveguides to make their qubits and not a single on calibrated there measurements... Ridiculous. I nearly lost it.

*promote

Promoting this video back to the front page; last published Sunday, December 9th, 2007 10:46am PST - promote requested by kulpims.