2>2 or: How I Learned to Stop Waiting and Love the Computer

The fuss on quantum computing has been quite excessive considering it has been going on for almost 40 years now. Quantum computer (qc) has been accepted as a likely future innovation around in the 80's and has been expected to pop up sooner or later since that. Early pioners of qcs were pretty much living in the blind spot of the scientific community, until Richard Feynman got interested in the qcs. He had already that point won a Nobel price and was altogether very influential scientist, so he was able to raise the general interest in the qcs in hes speech in MIT - conference.

What would it do then?

Whole concept of quantum type of information technology is staggering all the way beyond the imaginable. Scientist have made such promises about qc that they would change the world at once and for good. Back to the title of this post. One may ask: What could quantum computing possibly offer if it uses basically same binary code than in ordinary Turing machine? Line of zeros and ones. The thing is that they are not the same numbers 0 and 1 since the code would the superposition of each other. Quantum bit is actually called qubit for that. Since the line of code would be in the superposition of all the other possible lines of code, this qc would answer all the possible variations of questions simultaneously. On the contrary classical computer could have to done that same thing, but time consumingly.

First commercially successful quantum computer might look like this.
Shuttle at The Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, New York.

The fun part of waiting these quantum computers is that nobody can't predict what the first truly successful qc looks like, or what technique it uses to produce qubits. The thing is that quantum mechanics provide numerous of ways to produce qubits. Basically any physical property that can be in superposition could be used to simulate qubits. So first Quantum-pc could have mirrors and lights and qubit would be the superposition of photon polarization. Or it could be using spin of a electron or why not spin of a nuclei. Several other possibilities is already know today.

Taking into consideration numerous ways to build a qc, and the time that has passed, you might ask what is still holding back development of quantum computers and why aren't they everywhere yet? Well, it's still possible that quantum computers will never take place and even when they eventually do, they won't make classical computers obsolete. It is because they do different things better. Much like classical physics does some things better and quantum physics other things. You wouldn't want to use quantum mechanics to build a entire car or boat. Trust me, you really wouldn't.

Further reading: Minds, Machines and Multiverse: The Quest for the Quantum Computer by Julian Brown.