A series of reports from the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science kicks off with new developments in quantum computing.
Quantum effects are vital to modern electronics. They can also be a damnable nuisance. Make a transistor too small, for example, and electrons within it can simply vanish from one place and reappear in another because their location is quantumly indeterminate. Currents thus leak away, and signals are degraded.
Other people, though, see opportunity instead. Some of the weird things that go on at the quantum scale afford the possibility of doing computing in a new and faster way, and of sending messages that—in theory at least—cannot be intercepted. Several groups of such enthusiasts hope to build quantum computers capable of solving some of the problems which stump today’s machines, such as finding prime factors of numbers with hundreds of digits or trawling through large databases. They gave a progress report to the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Vancouver.
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