Re: Next generation COBOL?


Herwig,

I have usually enjoyed your posts here as I share an interest in things
Quantum, and have devoted several years to gathering an understanding of the
way things work, at a very superficial level.

The works of Stephen Hawking, Brian Greene, et al, have helped to make some
of these very difficult concepts at least reachable for the majority of us.
However, in your post below I think you have expressed some of these ideas
with outstanding clarity and elegance.

I am taking a copy of portions of your post and will put them on the wall of
my office at home. (I have marked them in the text below.)

Have you considered writing some articles on this stuff? I know many people
would be pleased to have a digestible overview of some of the concepts for
Quantum Computing.

Marked passages below...

"Herwig Huener & Josella Simone Playton" <news@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
message news:dmatt5$okn$01$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> 2005-11-27 01:22:10 MET
>
> Oops - past midnight, and I ought to make another
> posting to c.l.c ...
>
> Steve Richfie1d wrote:
>
>> Herwig,
>>
>> I attended a talk and had some discussions afterwards with a group who
>> was working on a quantum computer for the NSA. The question came up:
>> Immediate problems aside, what COULD quantum computers potentially do for
>> us better than conventional computers?
>>
>> The only apparent answer seemed to be factoring large numbers for crypto
>> applications, which rather limits the number of potential sales to the
>> number of countries. While there are a LOT of other conceivable
>> applications, they all fail because either the setup would be impossibly
>> difficult or because conventional computers are fast enough, or there is
>> some other computational technology (e.g. analog) that would work well.
>
> Fact is, quantum computers were amongs us for eons. We
> have a simple device which aids the photon to compute
> a superposition of all it's possible ways, thus
> emerging nothing else as the laws of ordinary imaging
> optics. The device is called "eye", and most of us
> have two of them.
>
> You know the way game programmers compute those pictures
> visible on the screen? There are Raytracing algorithms
> and all that stuff - and you have still deficits,
> compared with reality. The reason is, nature does not
> do raytracing. She does Quantum Computing - with each
> photon.
>
> That hints the way to go. Quantum Computing is for
> simulations. Also, the concept of a Bit and Quantum
> Computing do not merge very well - after all, an
> observable of a physical system oftenly has more
> than two values. The QuBit just is the simplest quantum
> system to study, that's all (the unitary evolution
> of a single QuBit is a complex-valued 2*2 matrix,
> the isolated QuBit itsef dwells in a Hilbert Space
> of *only* 4 dimensions.).
>
> I expect that further research will reveal quantum
> algorithms which do not deal (only) with QuBits.
>
> Even David Deutsch himself changes his mind about
> the future now and then. Recently, he anounced
> that "Fully fledged quantum computation is within
> sight" - he wrote:
>
> I have recently changed my mind about the time scale
> for achieving fully fledged quantum computation. On
> my blog, I have stuck my neck out and suggested that
> it might be less than a decade away.
>
> http://www.qubit.org/people/david/index.php?blog=20050830143405
>
> Cluster quantum computation is the reason.
>
> The article he mentions is
>
> http://xxx.lanl.gov/abs/quant-ph/0508218
>
> Be careful: contains math in quantities maybe degrading
> your and my health (I have not yet fully digested it).
>

I found all of the above to be well written (it is hard to remember that
your first language is not English :-)) and extremely interesting. But then,
I have a predisposition towards this stuff, so others may not agree.


<snipped some exchanges>

>>> Programming Languages for quantum Computers, however,
>>> look very different from programming languages for
>>> classical computation.
>>
>>
>> Has someone proposed such a language? That WOULD be interesting.
>
> Yes. Quite some time ago I found an austrian
> scientist who had published an open source
> programming language for quantum computers.
> I have still an installation right here on my
> computer. It is called QCL (Quantum computing
> Language) by Bernhard Oemer <oemer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
> I copy in here the URLs from the README-file:
>
> http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/qcldoc/index.html
> http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/qcldoc/qcldoc.ps
>
> http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/quprog/index.html
> http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/quprog/qcldoc.ps
>
> I do not know whether these URLs are still correct -
> the time stamp of the files is 2001-01-17 ...
>
> What he did is creating a formalism with which to set up
> a few QuBits, initialize their amplitude and chase them
> throuch a network of various Quantum Gates. In the end,
> the QuBits are measured, and an ordinary randum number
> generator is used to emulate the behaviour of a quantum
> measurement.
>
> Because the Quantum Computation is emulated with
> classical computation throughout, you end up with
> a lot of amplitudes - even with only 30 QuBits,
> you can run out of memory easily, and you need
> much computing time - a real QC would not
> suffer from that.
>
Thanks for the links and the comments.

>>> His (and my) answer is the Many Worlds Interpretation of
>>> Quantum Mechanics
>>
I just find that too hard to swallow, but I haven't closed my mind on it yet
:-) And I certainly don't have a better idea... :-)
>>
>> In real-world simulations, it often boils down to the one-dimensional
>> numbers REALLY being approximate coordinates in a multi-dimensional space
>> that is long and narrow, with the number being the position along the
>> major axis. Only when you consider that those approximate numbers are
>> really hyperspheres of uncertainty in he multidimensional space can you
>> determine the potential extend of the uncertainty in your computations.
>
------The following is the part I want to frame :-)(I have edited it
slightly for punctuation and spelling) -----------------------

> Uncertainty in Quantum Physics does not result
> from imprecise measurements, and, consequentially,
> the inability to do exact simulations with inexact
> boundary conditions.
>
> Uncertainty in Quantum Physics results from the
> fact that the building blocks of reality are not
> particles, are not precise positions and impulses,
> are not facts. The building block of reality is
> nothing that we know in everyday life.
>
> The building block of reality is the quantum state.
> "Asking" a quantum state for a non-quantum quantity,
> such as position, yields the known behaviour of the
> uncertainty principle, the emergence of probability,
> and the emergence of many (classical) reality
> branches. All these are artefacts of the fact that
> our minds (as well as our computers) do not work
> with quantum concepts but with the condensed
> concept of "fact" - which we call a bit.
>
------------------------------------- end
uote ------------------------------

I found this so simple, coherent, and elegant that I definitely want a copy
of it.

(From now on, when I look at bits, I'll see collapsed wave functions... :-))

Thanks for posting it.

<snipped other good stuff>>

Pete.



.

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