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Science

UO Scientists Get Funding for Quantum Logic Gates 43

Posted by Roblimo from the another-step-toward-faster-cheaper-computers dept.
Matthew Crouse sent it in: a PR squib from the University of Oregon that says, "Physicists at the University of Oregon have secured a $1.5 million federal grant to lead a three-university effort aimed at developing an advanced micro-processing device called a 'quantum logic gate.'" Quantum Computing possibilities have been mentioned on Slashdot here, here, and in a number of other articles over the years, but it's nice to see yet another research group working in this potentially exciting field. "Many eyes make all bugs shallow" and all that, eh?
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UO Scientists Get Funding for Quantum Logic Gates More

UO Scientists Get Funding for Quantum Logic Gates

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  • Just had to take this chance to exclaim my pride in my home state! Oregon Represent! heh :)

  • Can you imagine how big the kernel will be in 20 years? :)

  • Ach! But whudda da radiation captain? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    As transistors get tinier and tinier, just like with RAM, one has to worry about stray radiation flipping bits. Error correcting transistors?! And tiny amounts of radiation are EVERYWHERE. In the ceramic cases of other chips. Thorium lenses in cameras. Amercium in smoke detectors. All potassium in your body is unstable (eventually decaying into argon). Even radiating heat sinks which like any black body must emit the occasional x-ray or gamma ray. This is insignificant to living things, but in a computer, even one flipped bit can screw things up bigtime. Lead casings needed? And forget use aboard spacecraft.
  • So hold on a sec here buddy..

    if youre so hip, happening, and social, what the hell are you doing on here to be reading our posts?

    and moreso, the fact that you have the opportunity and time to take away from [beign with your family | singing | looking at the lights on your christmas tree ] only makes you as 'bad' as us!

    Anything else??

    And besides, not all of us celebrate the birth of some bullshit myth of some guy who made the world. You expect me to believe that the world was just created? And that its all overlooked by some superior figure that was born 2000 years ago? Pull the other one matey, the only superrior fogure in this equation is extraterrestrial beings... I will be much more ready to accept that we live in an experimental sandbox universe created by aliens simply for the purpose of amusement. At least that has some substantuality...or at least more than worshipping some book that rekons the universe just appeared as if by magic!

    Christ...only now do I relise that by launching into this debate/rant on why religion sux ass, I have only succeeded in bringing myself down to your level of posting offtopic crap to waste moderators points in being moderated down to -2....

  • Maybe?? I dunno.

  • I sit in a room with 1....2....3....4....monitors. They are arranged in ascending order from 15" to 19" to 19" to 21". In adition to this there is a blazing 32" television behind me. I dot care about the itty bitty radiation. With the way im going my kids are going to have 3 eyes an 6 fingers on each hand. Hey!! That would be great for posting on /.!!!

  • Sounds alot like what these guys [openqubit.org] need to get a quantum computer working. Of course, how do you backup a quantum computer? As soon as you try you compress the wave function of the data and *poof* no more data. Of course, if you're content to never look at your data, it will remain in a perfect state..... =)

  • that "UO Scientists" meant Ultima Online scientists? *shushes before i make myself out as more of a fool then i have already*




    -confidential
  • That depends... do you believe your kernel exists? There is a probability that the code will compile optimally, but without viewing the results you can't compress the wave function and find out.... *muwhahahahahaahahahahaha!* It's like a Microsoft product: it seems really fast until you look!

  • Re:Cool! (Score:1)

    by dido ( 9125 )
    A quantum computer would compile a kernel at most equally fast, and most probably far slower, than a normal, classical machine. It's only when you've got good stuff, i.e. quantum algorithms available for a particular task are they going to burn rubber and leave your classical machine out in the dust. Granted, someone may find a quantum algorithm for parsing and event state machine processing (there's an unordered quantum search that goes O(sqrt(N)) by L. Grover), but 'less we have that, no dough. Quantum computers are strange artifacts, to say the least, and require a completely different programming paradigm.
  • And were you, like me, disappointed to find out this story wasn't referring to ultima online scientists?
  • intergrated circut. =) merry xmas -nick
  • Quantum encryption does exist; the technology was invented by Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard, based on an idea for quantum money by Stephen Wiesner in the 1960's (The Code Book, Doubleday press, 1999). The technology is not only theoretical, but has been demonstrated by transmitting a series of photons (of unknown polarity) both over an optic fibre (over a 23 km stretch!) and, more recently, over the air (Los Alamos National Lab, over a distance of 1km). Quantom cryptography is essentially a means of transmitting a key for a one time pad scheme; a random series of 1s and 0s that can be used to encrypy/decrypt a transmission. Such a form of key transmission relies on the fact that the polarity of a photon can not be measured with certainty; it guarantees absolute security.

    Every jumbled pile of person has a thinking part that wonders what the part that isn't thinking isn't thinking of...
  • What you're referring to is Jack St. Clair Kilby's patent on the integrated circuit. It didn't kill the nascent computer industry then, because nobody but the big companies capable of paying royalties for it were capable of duplicating the IC manufacturing process (BTW, The Japs tried to get around this patent but lost after 30 years, so they'll have to keep paying royalties until 2004 [I think], long after the patent has expired in the rest of the world!). For a quantum computer the process will probably be even more difficult, and enormous quantities of capital would be required, so patent royalties would be a drop in the bucket as far as investment would be concerned, and wouldn't stop the industry from progressing. Patents are not all bad. The whole point of patents is to keep trade secrets from vanishing. Would you rather have the inventor getting rich over his invention or lose the secret forever because his/her company made a bad investment and had to fold? In the case of physical hardware, like the designs for a quantum computer, they would do immeasurably more good than bad. It's just that people have found a loophole in the process and found ways of patenting things for which the patent process should not be applicable, like algorithms.
  • John Barnes' new book Finity [amazon.com] discusses the potential downsides of the quantum interface in some depth. The book is basically a quantum look at Heinlein's idea for The Number of the Beast [amazon.com], without being as well executed.

    The question is, how does observing the answer to a question posed to a quantum computing device change the questioner? If you are a subscriber to the many-worlds inperpretation [airtime.co.uk] (MWI), you might surmise that one questioner is created for each possible outcome. Imagine there being two Schrodingers, one for each cat.

    I suppose the nice thing about science fiction that is based on the MWI is that it tends to be logically consistent about time travel, while remaining interesting. An example of a fiction that isn't logically consistent: 7 days [upn.com]. One where non-paradoxical time travel leads to fatalism: White Dragon [amazon.com], by Anne McCaffrey. Simon Hawke's Time Wars series, while not being wonderfully written, are at least logically consistent, due to their reliance on the MWI.

  • Cool! (Score:1)

    by tweder ( 22759 )

    Raymer notes that while the development of the quantum computer is still perhaps 20 years in the future, if one were ever built, it would be used "for certain special tasks and might operate thousands to millions of times faster than the largest parallel processor computer" available today.

    Can you imagine how fast a kernel would compile on this!?!
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Pretty fast...i seem to recall a past slashdot article about the 512bit european bank encryption being fried by a quantum computer. Here [slashdot.org] it is.

  • Anyone that needs to know (Score:3)

    by xodarap ( 65815 ) on Saturday December 25, 1999 @06:08AM (#1446159) Homepage
    If you need to know more about this technology, check out this link : http://www.sandia.gov/media/quantran.htm

    Josh
    XYZ-I finish what I start
  • SLASHDOT IS A PRESENT FOOL!!!! Commander Taco and Hemos are the SMP santaclauses!!!!!!!!! Now Go Elsewhere And Leave Us Be?
  • 1.5 million dollars for a 3 university project? I don't imagine they'll get very far in their research unless they are very, very resourceful. Coming from someone who has a research physicist in the immediate family, 1.5M is on the very low end of the grants scale. I know of some recent biology development grants that have exceeded 1 billion.

    Another issues is the practicality of quantity manufacture should the U of O researchers come up with a chip. Chip manufacturing at .28 microns isn't going to cut it anymore. However, should these developments occur, we would most certainly shatter Moore's "Law" one and for all.

  • 1.5 Million in grant automagically has the top half knocked off by the universities themselves for "overhead costs". So, unless they applied for a 3 million dollar grant, they're *really* not going to get very far. Having a professor for a father, i'm all too familiar with the corporate engine known as the university system.

  • On the contrary, this is exactly where the patent system should be giving motivation to inventors and researchers. Wasn't this the original intent of the patent system -- to motivate people to strive for an achievement, with the temporary reward from the patent system as an incentive?

    IMHO this is different from the silly 1-click shopping patents and stuff like that, which are nothing groundbreaking, just greedy hoarding. But in the case of quantum computing, these people are actually breaking new ground, so they should be rewarded.

    But of course, with the current state of the patenting system, this could easily be abused... Although in this case I'm more inclined to think that areas like these are where the patent system should be operating -- NOT in areas like marketing, where it's more a matter of greed than innovation. When researchers are making ground-breaking discoveries/inventions like quantum gates, they should be rewarded. But the patent system should NOT be acting as "greed-security" by granting idiotic patents to marketing types (like 1-click shopping).

  • Why is government money being put into this? It's one thing to fund basic science that might possibly someday benefit people if only someone would work on it. But this has huge, obvious, and (relatively) near term applications. Why not leave it for private industry and save the federal money for something else?
  • In theory atleast, your problem is allready solved "in another universe". This would strike me as an interface problem. I've also read the startling conclusion that a 'quantum computer' would solve many problems without even being turned on! So several could solve most problems even if they don't exist. Ofcourse an infinite number of these machines don't 'exist', so the best i make of it all is that you must be able to build an interface to this strange universe(s) and everything is solved.

    I don't think $1.5Million to a university is going to scratch the surface. I suspect a $Trillion or so will be spent before any practical results come of it. All i've seen so far is 'jars' of supercooled matterial that don't really solve anything.
  • This guy obviously understands xmas more than anyone.

    He, like jesus, is a martyr. and he is sacrificing his xmas to let all the other nerds know that spending time on slashdot is wrong.


    wait, that'd be more like easter. whatever. maybe some of us just got a new 21 monitor for xmas and we are trying it out on slashdot.

    -nick
  • IC? What's IC? Internet Communications? Internal Clock? Investigating Communist?

  • Re:Cool! (Score:1)

    by Dj ( 224 )
    Here's a clue - Nobody has a quantum computer.

    The article was bollocks, and that's the technical term.

  • Unfortunately, not enough money is pumped into problems at hand. Yet, 1.5 million, in the cogs of things, is a rather miniscule amount of cash. The fact that the Government is givng that money says alot. Firstly, it shows intrest by the gov. which is a blessing in and of itself. Secondly, its symptomatic of the now common day "lets increase our computing power" disease (this is a good thing for i would be scraed if we were to stop progression and developement). Thirdly and Lastly, there is only so much that we can really do. I seem to have a decent grasp of the need for aide across the nation(let alone the world) but we cant give through the nose. Eventually we will be able to do so...but in good time. I dont expect things to change overnight.
  • Just $1,500,000? What the heck are they going to do with such a princely sum? I don't think that this is serious. If ever there is a major technical breakthrough in the field of quantum computing, none of us who are reading slashdot will ever hear about it. The NSA will have that information locked up tighter than the H-Bomb was ever classified. I smell a US Government PR job buried in all this. Ever see Chain Reaction? If ever a major breakthrough that allows the construction of a machine with a nontrivial number of qubits does occur in the near future, the US gov't will quickly take steps to put it under wraps. They'll probably exploit it, too, without letting anyone know about it. When they feel that "the world is ready," that's when they'll start feeding it to some company that has, for some reason, earned government favor. Which may be a long time in coming. I remember Colossus was so deeply classified until relatively recently, after three generations of computers had come and gone! Unless, of course, a practical quantum encryption scheme is developed first and becomes widely adopted, which seems a more likely scenario (encryption is easier and simpler than computation).
  • christ...

    but it wasnt even the first post you loser!
    haha

    so is this what script kiddies do for amusement these days?
    Ohh, i can't comprehend the ideas portrayed in these intelectual articles, why dont I just be a cock and try and obstruct the data like a good little rebel script kiddie! yay!

    you make me sick...

  • Wasn't this the original intent of the patent system -- to motivate people to strive for an achievement, with the temporary reward from the patent system as an incentive?

    Actually, not really. First, I prefer the term rationale to intent, and, second, the justification for patents is actually a little more complicated (and, not necessarily true, either):

    The rationale was that by having a patent system you would be granted a monopoly in order to preserve your profit from innovation while requiring you to disclose your secret.

    The patent system was designed in the age of alchemy and craftsmanship, when you would produce products in your underground lair, while jealously guarding chemical secrets to keep your competitive advantage. When you died, your secret died with you. The system of patents was introduced with the aim of furthering the public good by granting you a monopoly for life (yep, 17 on top of age 30 would about cover it) so that you would tell everyone what your secret was.

    I think it is important to bear in mind all sides of this rationale, because the premises do not necessarily hold today, especially in academic environments, and perhaps the timescales are all wrong. If geeks are incented to discover things anyway, and academicians to publish, or if reverse engineering is simple, we don't necessarily need patents to encourage innovation or to get public disclosure.

    You may believe that extra incentives are necessary, or you choose to believe in patents as part of some libertarian/rationalist religion where you think it is "moral" to be rewarded for being smart, but from the perspective of society at large it may simply have the effect of amplifying rewards to the smart at the expense of the consumer.

  • Excellent Post! I kept trying to write a reply, but couldn't do it without flaming. There is only one thing that disturbs me: if the technology is developed with government funding I believe patents should not be granted. Unfortunately this seems to happen very often. I think it is called 'technology transfer', but that could be something else.

    Of course if the inventor just happens to work at a federally funded university, but received no extra funding and worked independently, then the patent should be o.k.

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