A Brief Introduction to the Quantum Computer and Its Implications

Since the invention of the personal computer, society has begun to exponentially increase its developmental speed. We've seen inventions from Napster to Ebay, from online stock trading to dating websites, iPhones to iPods, no matter how large or small, you cannot deny their part in revolutionizing our society. Yet despite these harrowing inventions our thirst for computing capacity and speed has not been quenched. So whats next? Computer engineers like Howard Aiken in 1947 had predicted that just six electronic digital computers should be plenty to satisfy the United States.  However, they could not begin to imagine the great strides scientific research has begun to make let alone inventions like the internet. Perhaps the biggest breakthrough in scientific thought is the relatively new science of Quantum Physics which revolutionized our entire universal view. Suddenly laws were not set in stone. The universe revealed it's chaotic beauty through phenomenoms like nonlocality and Particle/Wave duality, presenting exciting new implications for it's impressive power.

Quantum physics is the study of the discrete, invisible units of energy. The five main ideas of Quantum Theory included that the atomic world was nothing like the one we live in so cannot be held to our previously observed laws of nature. Another idea is that of particle/wave duality; that elementary particles simultaneously behave like waves and particles. One more groundbreaking discovery was the fact that energy is not as continuous a flow as we previously assumed, but actually broken down into tiny units. The movement of these particles is inherently random and more confusing still since it is impossible to know both the position and the momentum of the particle at the same time; in fact, the more precisely one is known the less accurately the other will probably be hypothesized. So what did this ground-work on the theory of quantum particles have to do with how fast we can download our favorite albums or movies onto our personal PC? Well like all science and technology, one has direct implications on the other. For the more we understand something the easier it is to harness for our benefit.

This brings us to the much talked about and awaited invention of the Quantum Computer. Moore's Law states that the number of transistors on a microprocessor continues to double every 18 months. This predicts that by the year 2020 or 2030  we will find the circuits on a microprocessor measured on an atomic scale. Therefore Moore's Law combined with the proliferation of Quantum Mechanical study in science implys that logically, the next big computational breakthrough will be the creation of quantum computers. Quantum computers will harness the power of atoms and molecules to perform memory and processing tasks. This gives them the potential to perform certain calculations significantly faster than any silicon-based, binary computer such as the one sitting before you. Scientists have already built quantum computers that can perform certain calculations but a practical model is anxiously awaited. 

This idea of a quantum computer is a relatively young one. Computers have been around for the majority of the 20th century, however, quantum computing was first theorized less than 30 years ago. A physicist at the Argonne National Laboratory, Paul Benioff, is credited with first applying quantum theory to computers in 1981. Benioff theorized about creating a quantum Turing machine. Most digital computers, like the one you are using to read this article, are based on the Turing Theory. The Turing Theory is a sort of theoretical machine to help aid in the comprehension of computational algorithms. It was devised as early as 1936 and it's inventer Turing himself wrote of it in 1948 as: 

"an infinite memory capacity obtained in the form of an infinite tape marked out into squares on each of which a symbol could be printed. At any moment there is one symbol in the machine; it is called the scanned symbol. The machine can alter the scanned symbol and its behavior is in part determined by that symbol, but the symbols on the tape elsewhere do not affect the behavior of the machine. However, the tape can be moved back and forth through the machine, this being one of the elementary operations of the machine. Any symbol on the tape may therefore eventually have an innings."

In a Quantum Computer ordinary bits are replaced by qubits. The key feature of qubits is that they can be in a quantum superposition of 0 and 1. The theological implications of the Turing Machine led to the invention of your personal computer because it runs largely off Kallman's Algorithum in which there is a permanance of 0,1 matrices and letters are sequences. For instance, the letter A maybe 00011 the letter B11000, C01010, D10101 and etc., where 0 represents off and 1 represents on comparable to a light switch's two options. However with a quantum computer, 0 and 1 can be coexistant at any given moment thanks to the quantum principles we briefly discussed of nonlocality and particle/wave duality. This means while a bit is the basic unit of computer information where regardless of its physical realization, it is always understood to be either a 0 or a 1; a qubit has some similarities to a classical bit, but is overall very different. The key difference being that a qubit can have two possible values—whereas a bit must be either 0 or 1, a qubit can be 0, 1, or a superposition of both. This means that an infinitely larger number of calculations is possible, speed will be instantaneous and functions like code-breaking and the infamous quantum telephone book become very real possibilities. This quantum parallelism can be viewed as a large parallel computer requiring no more hardware than that needed for a single processor. Joining the two deepest and most successful scientific courses of study of the 20th and 21st centuries; quantum physics and computer science. Beyond it;s obvious uses, the implications of such an invention is also key to our understanding of the atomic world.

While this article has simply been a synopsis of the general principals and ideas behind the much anticipated invention of the century, it leaves out the more difficult to explain mathematical algorithms or principles of quantum mechanics such as The Chernoff Bound, Deterministic chaos, and Reversable computation. However, this introduction into the physical materialization of this centuries most important scientific discoveries is a topic for not only the tech-savy or science minded but for anyone and everyone excited about the implications of our current universal knowledge on a technological scale. As the world leaps and bounds its way into the future, our universal understanding evolves with us and we become nature's magicians; performing what was considered impossible feats just a few years before with majestic grace and ease.