Welcome, and prepare to witness a breakthrough in computational technology!
This page is dedicated to the exciting new field of computational physics - quantum computing. Quantum computing is a revolutionary new field that utilizes the bizarre affects of quantum mechanics, the theory of the very small. It promises to forever change the way computers work. Computers are a daily part of our lives, doing things that never seemed possible just 100 years ago. It is an exciting time to stand at the frontier of computational science, and watch as it transforms itself into an even more powerful and useful technology.
Quantum mechanics is our best theory of how the universe works. It was first formulated at the turn of this century by great names such as Shrodinger, Heisenburg, Bohr, DeBroglie, among many others. Quantum mechanics portrayed a very strange picture of the universe. It predicted such bizarre events as a duck that was both dead and alive, and told us that the act of measuring necessarily changed the object being measured. It was so counterintuitive, that even Einstein argued that quantum mechanics must be an inaccurate picture of reality because it was so strange. However, every experiment to date has confirmed the predictions of quantum mechanics.
Just a decade ago, it was realized a computer based on quantum principles could be built. For many years, various contrived uses were invented for this 'hypothetical' machine. It was not until 1994 that Shor of AT&T Bell Labs developed a truly useful algorithm for a quantum machine. Shor developed an algorithm for factoring large integers. There is no known algorithm that can do so on a classical machine; all known algorithms are not efficient enough to be useful at factoring very large numbers. With this breakthrough came many others, including the ability to efficiently search through an unsorted list, something that was not thought to be possible. You can download Shor's revolutionary contribution to the field here.
While studying at Stanford University this summer, I was introduced to this remarkable field. I have written a research paper on this topic; it can be downloaded here.
Thank you for reading about quantum computing. If you are interested in more information, see the references below. It is remarkable to stand at the turn of another century and witness a revolution that will change forever the way we do computing. Stay tuned for recent developments, and keep your eyes open, else you'll miss the big show . . . .
References
Williams, Colin P. Explorations in Quantum Computing. Springer-Verlag: 1998.
Shor, Peter W. "Polynomial-Time Algorithms for Prime Factorization and Discrete Logarithms on a Quantum Computer," Proceedings 35th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science: 1994. pp. 124-134.
Steane, A. M. "Quantum Computing," Centre for Quantum Computation (http://www.qubit.org): 1998.
Frank, Michael P. "Quantum Computation Primitives," MIT AI Lab. 1996.
Download
Shor's paper on prime factorization (Postscript format, 243Kb)
My research paper (Microsoft Word 97 format, 341Kb)
Copyright © 1998, by Daniar Hussain