Quantum computers

If you use a computer (of course you do, your on the web aren’t you) and you do not know about quantum computers you are going to be amazed!! Most computer users are amazed when they see a desk top computer that runs at 500 Mg Hz. Wow, they say, just two years ago desk top computers ran at less than 100 Mg. Hz. But these speeds are slow compared to the super computers like the "Cray" T 90 supercomputer that now operate in the neighborhood of 60 giga flops per sec. A FLOP is a different measurement than is used for desktop computers. When you say a desk top computer is running a 500 Mg Hz, you are measuring the speed at which the computer is capable of switching a "1" to a "0" which is the code that computers use in order to work. A Flop on the other hand stands for Floating-Point Operations per Second. Which is to say the Cray actually makes 60,000,000,000 complete math calculations every second. Our 500 Mg Hz desktop model may or may not be doing about 50,000,000 math calculations per second.

But supercomputers are not really that much faster than the desk computer you are using now. The reason that I say this is because the supercomputer is nothing more than numerous desktop computers working together. So of course 20 mathematicians can work faster than 1.

Quantum computers don’t exist yet but if one were built it would theoretically operate billions of times faster than our desktop computer. That would mean that your desktop computer would work at 500 tera Hz. or 500,000,000,000,000 Hz. Why so fast? Well, to begin with, a quantum computer is not bound by the same earthly rules that computers today are. Computers today work by turning hundreds of thousands of microscopic switches off and on. Just like any switch that turns on the lights or the TV set, the computers switches can only be in one state at a time. The TV is on or it is off; the room light is either on or off, only one state at a time. But just think how much faster a computer could work if it could be in more than one state at a time, therefor on and off at the same time! Yes, you read the sentence correctly, that is like being pregnant and not pregnant at the same time. Impossible! you say, well this impossible thing is here. Japanese researchers now say that they have built such a switch, and further more that they have build this switch using the same material and methods that are used to make conventional computers.

In computer talk, when a switch is either, in its on state, or off state, it is called a bit, but when a quantum computer is in both states at once it is called a qubit. You see, we have been raised to believe that the world is made out of bits. But the truth is, the world is made out of qubits. 1
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