Ok so as some of you may or may not know, I have been writing a paper about quantum computing. I'm discussing qubits right now. Well, if you took two superpositioned qubits and performed a calculation on them, you would get four results. You would get 0/0,0/1,1/0, and 1/1 results. This grows exponentially with more qubits. Anyway, let's say you take just 2 bits and perform a calculation on them. You get one result. What if you take 4 bits and perform a calculation on them? Do we still only get one result?
To me, this sounds like an outrageous benefit from quantum computers.
Where can I learn more about quantum computing? It sounds awesome and I want to program something related to it (though I doubt I'd be able to, especially on a normal computer) but I don't know of any good resources for it. I'll read the Wikipedia article for the time being.
It should be about as done as it'll be tomorrow. Gives a nice basic explanation of the phyics behind it, and goes more into the computer science side of things
Qubits are the future of computers once they do perfect replacing the silicon in computers with man-made diamonds. They were estimated to be done in 2011 but as we can easily see, it is 2012 and still no diamond chipped computers are out yet so they are late. It will be interesting to see who corners the market on them and how far into computer speeds it takes us because Qubits are dependent on being able to control the position of the electron using magnetic fields and that means you have to create an environment where no magnetic fields will penetrate except the ones you want to get into there. It will really be interesting to see what they come out with, hopefully sooner then later.
Sadly, the field still has a long way to go. Research groups have only managed to get several qubits working together so far. Though there is a company called D-Wave I believe that has supposedly managed 30 qubits, though people speculate that no entanglement was actually present