Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
Only PDF I'm afraid  The quantum is referring to quantum mechanics. i.e. a computer driven by the laws of quantum rather than classical physics. Turns out to be significantly more powerful. For example, using a classical computer to search through a collection of N unsorted entries,will take, on average N/2 queries, whereas with a quantum computer it can be done in the square root of N. For very large N this can be a huge speedup. |
I get the general idea (I was a physics major for 2 years with an interest in quantum mechanics), but I still haven't worked out how using quantum effects is faster. Is it faster for all sorts of calculations, or for specific tasks such as factoring (as mentioned in the BBC article above)? I know you mentioned search, which is so common that by itself it would be a help, even if regular silicon ICs were faster for other stuff. But I suspect there are broader applications. The only thing that seems analogous to me so far is that if the photons can be in multiple places at once, maybe you can do parallel processing that way?