Non-PC Geeks

Last week it was announced that a Canadian Company named D-Wave would be demonstrating the first commercially working quantum computer on Tuesday Feb 12th. While this announcement has been covered pretty well in the press, so far we at nonpcgeeks.com haven’t been able to find any sort of coverage of the actual event. D-Wave claimed to be demonstrating their system solving several different problems. They also have stated that they’ll be leasing time on the system so 3rd parties could write programs to run on it.

Why is this a big deal? Quantum computers differ from traditional digital computers in that they can search a solution space in substantially less time than a digital computer can. For instance, say you’re trying to find the two numbers that are factored to create an encryption key. For a digital computer to do this, it has to search every possible number combination until it finds the correct one. In a Quantum computer, the entire solution space (all the possible combinations) are performed simultaneously (we won’t even attempt to get into the “how it’s done” here, but can recommend a good book called “A Shortcut Through Time”) arriving at the solution in only several steps, and vastly less time. As a result, quantum computers will be fantastic for problems that are currently classified as NP complete, but highly intractible.

If anyone has seen a good article describing the demo and whether it was successful, please let us know! We’re really interested in this new form of computing and the changes it could herald into our world over the upcoming years.

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