Comments on: Quantum Leap Forward

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:30:45 +0000

No worries… Schrödinger’s Equation/Wave Model and the Uncertainty Principle are inextricably linked. Regardless, you explained it properly. I’m a jackass.

Self-deprecation is the result of the internet being added to a system.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:32:58 +0000

Correction made. Thank you for making me feel like a dumbass. In my defense, it was 3:30am when I wrote this, and as I was writing I kept thinking about that damn cat in the box.

By: Ryan

Ryan — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 18:18:05 +0000

Ahem… it’s the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

It’s one of the few principles of Physics and Chemistry that I recall from high school. Le Chatelier’s Principle is another good one, but totally irrelevant to this topic.

Anyway, observation and measurement usually affects a system at the atomic or subatomic scale, as energy is necessarily applied to a given system when analysed by instruments capable of measuring said scale. The “reality” of the particle existing is not compromised, but even electrons can be excited and displaced from their “resting” state by measurement. Ergo, you could decipher the location of an electron, but you more than likely put it in that location.

This was a really interesting post, Dave. I too am having difficulty understanding some of the contradictory logic presented by quantum theory and particle behaviour. Maybe I need to read more into the “partial measuring” methods to understand how the resting and excited states were mitigated.

I’m out of my element.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 16:50:49 +0000

Here's a concrete example of a question that might stump a conventional computer for ... well, forever, if there were enough points of information involved. This is exactly the type of question a quantum computer could make vastly easier.

By: Dave

Dave — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:41:31 +0000

*By calculating in a non-linear way, I mean that quantum computers can take advantage of quantum particles’ ability to exist in several states and places at once — to do several calculations at once. Traditional computers do one calculation after another — and they can do them really, really quickly, but when you get into things like simulating weather patterns, even a million calculations a second isn’t enough. Far better to do a million calculations in an instant (which isn’t really a scientific measurement of time, but anyway, it’s really short).

One of my favourite analogies to describe how quantum computers perform multiple calculations simultaneously is this: imagine (again) that you’re looking for a dog in a house with 100 rooms. If you were a normal computer, you’d go from room to room and check them all, and maybe you’d strike the correct room right away, but maybe you’d have to check 99 empty rooms first. If you’re a quantum particle forming a single bit of a quantum computer, though, and you can exist in several places at once, you could simultaneously visit all 100 rooms at once. Then, you simply report back to home base: “The dog is in room 53.” And that’s just a single bit — networking these bits into a processor could conceivably make computers capable of quickly solving problems that would take years for a conventional computer.