Quantum computers anyone?

[SS4 Gogeta]

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/02/09/tech-dwavequantumcomputer-20070209.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_computing#The_power_of_quantum_computers

The title "B.C. firm to show off quantum computer" caught my eye beause, B.C.= British Columbia, which is a province in Canada. It just happens to be the province I live in :laff:. I continued to read the article and came across "Vancouver-area company" I was like wow thats pretty close to home, which only hightens my interest. As I read on I see "D-Wave Systems Inc. of Burnaby" I was at my cousin's house while I was looking at this article, and was reading it out loud so he could hear, when I came across Burnaby(city close to Vancouver, Canada) we were both like woah.

Burnaby is our home town, I found out the company is like 15min away from my house O_O. It's pretty exciting knowing somthing so close to home, could potentially put us in the Quantum age of technology.

 

[Limp]

Yup, this how it will begin, quantum computers today, tomorrow.....hello gateway to hell, got to go buy some guns & ammo.

 

[frsrblch]

D-Wave Systems? ****, I applied to work there this summer. I didn't know they were so close to having a working model.

 

[Sandstorm]

Somewhat limited in use. I don't care if your computer can do 64,000 or even 500,000 simultaneous operations -- if all it can do is one of three mathematic equations, then it has no practical use in the daily lives of you or I. Though I'm sure it's great for scientists and maybe even military personnel.

Kind of like if I was to invent a fail proof method of dealing with radioactive waste -- totally useless in my (and more than likely your) daily life.

 

[J-Dude]

The Quantum computer? You mean the computer the size of a molecule that has nearly infinite resources and speed, as described in Michael Crichton's "Tmeline"?

 

[Hibiki]

They have been working on this for a long time and its good to see actual progress being made.

Somewhat limited in use. I don't care if your computer can do 64,000 or even 500,000 simultaneous operations -- if all it can do is one of three mathematic equations, then it has no practical use in the daily lives of you or I. Though I'm sure it's great for scientists and maybe even military personnel.

Whats this "CD" drive? Man who could ever use 400 mb of data! That will never be practical for consumers!

Yeah I really wouldn't be so shortsighted. The sheer possibilities of quantum processing is damn near limitless.

 

[J-Dude]

Lol, excellent point. As recently as 1991, giving computers 100 kilobytes of RAM was considered overkill. We can't assume that we don't have serious breakthroughs around the corner.

Man, I can see it now: Pixar providing those making games out of their movies with the actual movie models to be used in game. Crazy? We'll see

 

[SaiyanPrideXIX]

The idea is, pretty simply, if it can do 64,000 at once, imagine if it could also work at the rate of current processors...

My computer has a 2.6ghz processor. That's 2600 megahertz. Each megahertz is what, a million singular hertz cycles? Now imagine if each singular hertz--which is a term for one complete instructional cycle through the computer's processor--could carry 64,000 bits of binary data instead of just 1.

Getting the picture now?

 

[Sandstorm]

The idea is, pretty simply, if it can do 64,000 at once, imagine if it could also work at the rate of current processors...

My computer has a 2.6ghz processor. That's 2600 megahertz. Each megahertz is what, a million singular hertz cycles? Now imagine if each singular hertz--which is a term for one complete instructional cycle through the computer's processor--could carry 64,000 bits of binary data instead of just 1.

Getting the picture now?

64,000 operations at once doing the same operation over and over again. Don't buy into buzz words, read between the lines.

And, likewise, it can only do 3 modes of operation: Fractions, Exponents, and Logarithms.

I'm not saying it won't accomplish more in the future, I'm sure it will. But right now, it's a theoretical idea that doesn't do anything other than mathematic equations. 10 years from now, maybe it'll be doing 3000 simultaneous operations that a PC can do, but, 64,000 basic operations won't play Half-Life 2.

 

[Zeonix]

D-Wave demonstrated their Quantum Computer:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa001&articleID=BD4EFAA8-E7F2-99DF-372B272D3E271363

 

[harSens]

64,000 operations at once doing the same operation over and over again. Don't buy into buzz words, read between the lines.

And, likewise, it can only do 3 modes of operation: Fractions, Exponents, and Logarithms.

I'm not saying it won't accomplish more in the future, I'm sure it will. But right now, it's a theoretical idea that doesn't do anything other than mathematic equations. 10 years from now, maybe it'll be doing 3000 simultaneous operations that a PC can do, but, 64,000 basic operations won't play Half-Life 2.

Calculating a polygons coordinates in (skeleton) animation takes at least 36 multiplications and 24 additions. For a whole model , all coordinates can be calculated simultaniously using such a machine, meaning that it can do a single animation of a 1700 polygon model in 2 clock ticks (one for multiplying, one for adding), where a standard cpu would take at least 40836. Computer graphics and physics contain tons of problems that can be solved in parallel like that, so in the future it would be very helpful to play Half-Life 2.

 

[Sandstorm]

I'm not saying it won't accomplish more in the future,

It's currently slower than a low-end PC at this time, thus, it's not going to play Half-Life 2. Please don't quote me and disregard context.

I'm sure the quantum computer might be available sometime in the future. I won't be surprised if their Q4 hopes aren't met. Either way, it'll probably cost at least twice or even thrice as much.

However, considering that the quantum computer operates on an entirely different design, there is also the (large) possibility that current 32 and 64-bit software would be rendered incompatible. A chance to run a powerful machine without the taint of a Windows Operating System would definitely be nice.

I'm as excited about the thought as anyone else, but, you can't just hail a theoretical idea as god, until it is proven. And it serves no purpouse to have ten people all chanting the same hypnotic mantra, someone has to point out the other half of the equation.

 

[Hibiki]

I'm as excited about the thought as anyone else, but, you can't just hail a theoretical idea as god, until it is proven. And it serves no purpouse to have ten people all chanting the same hypnotic mantra, someone has to point out the other half of the equation.

It's as theoretical as bio-diesel or anything else. This is an absolutely proven concept and they have working models. I don't see how you could possibly say this is just a theory.

And you keep saying "It can only do math" as if math is somehow simple and non important. You do realize pretty much 99% of everything is broken down into some sort of math problem and if your computer can do math well enough it can basically do anything as long as you program for it.

 

[harSens]

It's currently slower than a low-end PC at this time, thus, it's not going to play Half-Life 2. Please don't quote me and disregard context.

I'm sure the quantum computer might be available sometime in the future. I won't be surprised if their Q4 hopes aren't met. Either way, it'll probably cost at least twice or even thrice as much.

However, considering that the quantum computer operates on an entirely different design, there is also the (large) possibility that current 32 and 64-bit software would be rendered incompatible. A chance to run a powerful machine without the taint of a Windows Operating System would definitely be nice.

I'm as excited about the thought as anyone else, but, you can't just hail a theoretical idea as god, until it is proven. And it serves no purpouse to have ten people all chanting the same hypnotic mantra, someone has to point out the other half of the equation.

I didn't said I disagreed with you on how long it would take to be used in games... Anyways, the first gaming use I'd see for mass parallel computing power is in the GPU or as dedicated processor, rather than directly in the CPU.

 

[frsrblch]

This is simply a proof of concept, a prototype to prove that their idea works, and certainly far more than a theory. This isn't really intended for the average person, anyway, and gaming certainly isn't what they have in mind. Saying it doesn't matter because it has no direct application to you is just silly. It's like calling the airplane useless because you just want to go to school, and not halfway around the world.

Besides, who the hell needs that kind of power for playing a game? This is for folding proteins, modeling weather patterns, nuclear fusion research, fluid dynamics, quantum physics, and so on. Half Life 2 is so far beneath the aspiration of these machines it isn't even funny.

 

[J-Dude]

This is simply a proof of concept, a prototype to prove that their idea works, and certainly far more than a theory. This isn't really intended for the average person, anyway, and gaming certainly isn't what they have in mind. Saying it doesn't matter because it has no direct application to you is just silly. It's like calling the airplane useless because you just want to go to school, and not halfway around the world.

Besides, who the hell needs that kind of power for playing a game? This is for folding proteins, modeling weather patterns, nuclear fusion research, fluid dynamics, quantum physics, and so on. Half Life 2 is so far beneath the aspiration of these machines it isn't even funny.

Lol, give it like 7 years and we'll all be using PC's with a terabyte of RAM which costs $800. If history repeats itself, then we might be in for some damned quick improvements. Standards are always rising gentlemen.

 

[SaiyanPrideXIX]

I think implementing this as a main processor could be an issue, as all current generations of OS and software wouldn't be able to work with it.

If it were made part of the GPU, however...

 

[J-Dude]

Software wouldn't work? Meaning what? That we'd have to remake all our software from scratch? If that's the case, then it'll be a damned slow process. They'd have to start coding things to work with the new stuff as well as for current PC standard stuff. I dunno how we'd keep our old files then. Someone would need to come up with a pretty clever (and likely really complex) program to convert files to the new format or whatever.