James Woodward reports in The Scotsman that a team of Bristol University scientists are claiming the worlds first optical quantum chip. Cherry Lewis, the project spokesperson, said: "We are almost getting to the point now where conventional computers cannot go any smaller so we need to go down a completely new route. We are talking nano-scale. Particles of light." This may mean that in the near future computers (an their users) will be able to benefit from concepts such as:
- qubits - these are the equivalent of bits in traditional computing, but may have more than two states at the same time
- quantum parallelism - the ability of a quantum computer with a single processor to carry out parallel operations
- quantum superposition - any object can be in every possible state simultaneously
- quantum entanglement – particles are able to interact with each other regardless of the distance between them
- quantum registers – controlled groups of qubits
Of course, it may be a little while until any of these are actually on the market, but what any programmer can obtain is a quantum computer simulator
Obtaining A Quantum Computer Simulator
Fortunately obtaining a quantum computer simulator is not that difficult. There are just two steps:
- the first step is to download and install the Haskell programming language (see An Introduction to Programming with Haskell: Getting Started with the Haskell Programming Language)
- the second step is to download Jan Skibinski's quantum computer and quantum vector modules.
Both modules must be downloaded into the same directory, although that directory can be anywhere on the computer.
Starting the Quantum Computer Simulator
The programmer starts the quantum computer simulator by double clicking on the Quantum Computer Haskell source file (as shown in figure 1 at the bottom of this article).
Simple Quantum Computations
Skibinski gives some simple examples of how the quantum computer can be used. For example the programmer can create a quantum register containing 5 qubits all initialized to state | 0 >:
The programmer can then see an example of quantum superposition can then by using the mix function:
The result of this can be seen in figure 2.
A quantum computer simulator cannot, of course, truly replicate the performance that a real quantum computer will be able to achieve. It hasn't got the hardware. However, the programmer will be able to start to understand the concepts involved. And at least they'll have a bit of a head start when they do get their first quantum computer from Ebay.
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