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I was looking around on the internet and I found something. Most computers are configured in binary, but I lately found something called a Quantum computer, but I didn't find much on it, was wondering if anyone else knew anything about it. |
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Well quantum computers operate much in the same way as normal transistor based computers, as in binary 0s and 1s. However because of quantum mechanics we can't make transistors as small as we want them, at about the 5-10nm scale, the Heisenberg's uncertainty principle kicks in and we can't really tell where the electron is.. so we get a shortcut. This is when silicon based computers will die off, we simply can't make them any better. Moore's law will collapse after about 100 years of consistency. What will take it's place are quantum computers. They operate by bouncing radiation off spinning atoms. Now imagine if the transistor can be shrunk down to just an atom. In just 28grams of silicon there is 6.02 x 10^23 atoms. Compare that to the 5 x 10^9 transistors in our most advanced chips, and they weigh much more than that. The problem is that we can't get atoms to be stable enough to compute. Our largest quantum computer is just 5 atoms, yet it can calculate basic numbers. Many scientists believe that a bose-einstein condensate can be the solution to quantum computers, but the warmest stable B-E condensate is about 70 kelvin so it's nothing we can fit inside our computers even in the future. So quantum computers are at least 50-100 years away but eventually they will be the new way of computing. Fun fact, the robots in the movie Transformers use quantum computers^^ Here is a link to a professor Michio Kaku who has been speaking a lot about quantum computers and other future related stuff. |
