Quantum computing is here apparently, this little story on the BBC web site caught my eye today, its about a team in the USA who are showing off their latest device in Texas. It's a 6cm X 6cm chip that contains 4 (quantum) bits. Compared to modern transistor based devices this sounds puny, almost laughable, but quantum processors have an important trick up their sleeves, they take advantage of some quantum weirdness that is so weird it once lead the famous physicist and Nobel prize winner Richard Feynman to say "if you think you understand quantum theory, then you don't understand quantum theory". Normal computers deal with things that are in binary states, i.e. on or off, 1 or 0 but quantum computers can deal with things that are on and off at the same time, although completely counter-intuitive (i.e. how can something be both on and off at the same time?) this allows them to do calculations and scale at rates unprecedented in today's devices. There is much more work to do though, quantum states are notoriously difficult to maintain, even the slightest interaction with the outside world will destroy the delicate interactions going on inside the device.
I wonder if the rate of development in quantum computing will be as rapid as "Moore's Law" (a doubling of power every 18 months) has been with regular computing, I have plenty of tasty analytic problems to solve that are simply impossible with current technology although as with anything new, it's the interface with human beings that will be where the real challenge lies. I suspect my programming team would find all kinds of new and cunning ways to avoid fixing their bugs, "there's nothing wrong with my code boss, it's obviously quantum uncertainty"...
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