UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I was wondering if anyone has any information if UNIX/LINUX will be viable with quantum computing. I have very limited knowledge of quantum physics vs. Quantum computing and the correlation to UNIX/LINUX?

I have often sat and wondered about this too but when I came across your question, I began to wonder if you had read the rules for the forums. This sounds like the begining of a homework question (or essay).

But, here is a link to the center - Centre for Quantum Computation for inquiring minds.

Sorry,

I am not in school, I am a professional tech that is really interested in quantum computing and would like to get into it, but unfortuneately it seems that you need to be doing PhD work or be at least 100 yrs old to get into stuff like that. That is why I started the thread to see if there are others out there interested and have more info. I mean once they develop the hardware/circuits what kind of OS will be able to handle the computation???

Hmm, that's a strange question, IMO.

Anything you can currently do will be able to be done on a Quantum Computer. In other words, Quantum Computers will be able to emulate Classical Computers.

The question is strange because Quantum Computers are no where near the stage where people are thinking about what OSes are going to run on them. If you have a Computer Science background, relate it to Alan Turing having an idea about this Turing Machine he was going to make and how it could work, and then ask "Well, will it run UNIX?"

Quantum Computing will provide new methods of doing things that classical computers do, but most (if not all) of it is muddled up in theories and papers. UNIX may one day run on a Quantum Computer, but no one is thinking about that just yet. What the studies concentrate on is "How fast can a Quantum Computer Calculate the factors of this big number m compared to a Classical Computer?" or "How many queries in a given set of data will a Quantum Computer take to find an element n?", etc etc.

Hope that helps.

Ack, you replied before I had. Whoops.

Anyways, yeah, in answer to your last question, any OS should be able to be designed to handle the Quantum Computing ways, though none of them now would be able to support such a venture.

In classical computer, there's two states of a bit, 0 or 1. It's always either a 0 or a 1. Never anything else. In Quantum computing, it can be a 0, a 1, or both. The idea revolves around the chances of 'seeing' a 0 vs. the chances of 'seeing' a 1. Say, if you queried a "qubit" to see what was there 1000 times, you could possibly see a 0 500 time and a 1 500 times, giving a 50-50 ratio.

Because of this phenomenon, it opens the world of computing up to a wide range of problems that previously took problems that were "polynomial hard" and makes them "linear hard".

What OS will be running on them will remain to be seen. But it will have to be something new. Something likely we've never seen before.

Here is some more info on the subject that is very intersting. Almost to the point that I don't think that it is very far off in the future. When it happens I wonder how it will run.

http://www.news.wisc.edu/releases/view.html?id=7674

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url moved: http://www.news.wisc.edu/releases/7674.html

Interesting article.

However, my point still remains. Lining up these molecules and getting the electrons to act is only a small small part of the battle towards getting something as advanced as a usable computer with an OS out of this technology.

It's like the invention of a transistor. Transistors were invented in 1947, but it wasn't a good many years until computers became usable, and not even until 1969 that 'UNICS' came out and we're still not talking about the usability that we have today at that time.