Monday, February 12, 2007

Wave of the Future

D-Wave is announcing a demonstration of their 16-qubit quantum computer tomorrow. If true, this will be the technology story of the decade. While the mainstream media and blogsphere have been fixated on Vista, D-Wave could be the paradigm shift of computing.
While finding the primes in a 256-bit number might take our fastest computers millennium, quantum computers can run through all the possibilities in a clock cycle. Digital encryption as we know it now would be dead - if D-Wave's announcement is true. Whole new vistas of science will open as complex protein folding algorithms which previously took months to calculate are discovered in seconds. Crash simulations at auto companies can be performed over hundreds of body designs instead of just a few promising ones. It will be a brave new world of computing - if true.

Another story at Techworld .

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