quantum computer
NounOpen English WordNet
Noun (1)
- a computation system that makes direct use of quantum-mechanical phenomena, such as superposition and entanglement, to perform operations on data.“As of 2015, the development of actual quantum computers is still in its infancy, but experiments have been carried out in which quantum computational operations were executed on a very small number of quantum bits.”Type of computer, computing machine
What does it mean? Question 1 of today’s quiz
Free On-line Dictionary of Computing
<computer> A type of computer which uses the ability of quantum systems, such as a collection of atoms, to be in many different states at once. In theory, such superpositions allow the computer to perform many different computations simultaneously. This capability is combined with interference among the states to produce answers to some problems, such as factoring integers, much more rapidly than is possible with conventional computers. In practice, such machines have not yet been built due to their extreme sensitivity to noise.
Oxford University (http://eve.physics.ox.ac.uk/QChome.html), Stanford University (http://feynman.stanford.edu/qcomp/).
A quantum search algorithm (ftp://parcftp.xerox.com/pub/dynamics/quantum.html) for constraint satisfaction problems exhibits the phase transition for NP-complete problems.
(1997-02-11)