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Apress eBooks

Rise of the Quantum Machines: Fundamentals

Santanu Ganguly

Published Jan 1, 2021• 2 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Los Alamos Laboratory was celebrating its fortieth anniversary on April 14, 1983. Physics Laureate Richard P. Feynman stated in a lecture titled “Tiny Computers Obeying Quantum-Mechanical Laws” that computing based on classical logic could not easily and efficiently process calculations describing quantum phenomena. He offered his vision of computing that could operate in a quantum manner. Prior to making these historical comments, Feynman had always been a champion of thoughts leading toward computers leveraging laws of quantum mechanics when he stated, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” and, “Nature isn’t classical. If you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical,” which means to properly simulate quantum systems, you must use a quantum computer.

DOI
10.1007/978-1-4842-7098-1_1

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Los Alamos Laboratory was celebrating its fortieth anniversary on April 14, 1983. Physics Laureate Richard P. Feynman stated in a lecture titled “Tiny Computers Obeying Quantum-Mechanical Laws” that computing based on classical logic could not easily and efficiently process calculations describing quantum phenomena. He offered his vision of computing that could operate in a quantum manner. Prior to making these historical comments, Feynman had always been a champion of thoughts leading toward computers leveraging laws of quantum mechanics when he stated, “There’s plenty of room at the bottom” and, “Nature isn’t classical. If you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical,” which means to properly simulate quantum systems, you must use a quantum computer.
The last lecture course that Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman gave to students at Caltech was not on physics but on computer science. The course in 1983 was an overview of standard and not-so-standard topics in computer science, all given in Feynman’s inimitable style. This talk will begin by giving an overview of Feynman’s long-time interest in computing - starting with his time at Los Alamos during the war through to his suggestion of simulating physics on a quantum computer at a ‘Physics of Computation Conference at MIT in 1981 and his acting as a consultant for the parallel computer company, Thinking Machines. The talk will conclude with a summary of Feynman’s long-term interest in the physical limits to computation and the exemplary way he could communicate complex ideas to all types of audience.
Richard P. Feynman, a Nobel Prize winner in physics, was a physicist thought leader in the areas of quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics. In 1982, he published a research paper with the title “Simulating Physics with Computers”. In this paper, he asks the question if a quantum computer could be built (which he believed to be the case) or if classical computers can simulate the probabilistic behavior of a true quantum system (which he answered with a clear no). This research paper sparked interest in the scientific research community, which started to seriously explore whether or not a quantum computer can actually be built.
Universal computing can be dated to 1903 when Alan Turing’s theoretical model of the Turing machine led a large-scale innovative revolution towards digital computing machines.¹ The next milestone is to process and control information at its fundamental level — quantum states of particles. Richard Feynman first pointed out that as certain types of computational problems get more complex, classical bits fail to give efficient answers.² For example, when simulating quantum mechanics, the amount of memory needed to describe a quantum system increases exponentially with the number of its components. A new device — a quantum computer — is therefore highly sought after by physicists.³
As early as 1982 Richard P. Feynman suggested that it might be impossible to simulate quantum mechanical phenomena with a computer without an exponential slowdown the efficiency of computation. He also proposed that this problem may be avoided by allowing the computer to run according to the laws of quantum mechanics, thus implicitely suggesting that a computer based on the quantum mechanical systems, a quantum computer, might have exponentially more computational efficiency than any classical one. A quantum mechanical phenomenon that never occurs classical physics and which actually makes quantum computation interesting and powerful, is the superposition of states, which, loosely speaking, means that instead of being totally one single state, a particle can be in between many states. Compare this to the elements of classical computer, bits. A bit takes values zero or one, but never anything between. In a quantum computer, one is able to store it both values simultaneously one quantum bit, equally weighted or not. Moreover, the classical computer one can store a number from zero to 2n−12^n-12n−1 a register of length nnn, whereas, quantum computation, all the values could be stored simultaneously. The computation, which is performed via unitary transformations the state vector space, then applies to all these values simultaneously. Thus the power of the quantum computation lies not the absolute speed of the hypothetetical quantum computer but the possibility to actually follow many computational path simultaneously, as a nondeterministic automaton does. Alas, the observation of the outcome will yield only one value destroying the rest irreversibly. However, using a procedure smart enough one could obtain some valuable information about the computation.
There’s plenty of room at the bottom was the title of the lecture that Richard Feynman delivered in 1959. His talk at Caltech had more to do with what the future of information storage looked like, and that there was plenty of room available at the atomic level for the same. In the interest of this article however, we take a generalist view on the title of his talk and interpret it as “. . . plenty of room [for exploration] . . . ”. While Feynman was correct and we’ve indeed witnessed the meteoric rise in storage capabilities, the room for exploration has definitely squeezed a bit lately, with the debut of Quantum Computers.
Perhaps the most credible application of quantum computers is to study quantum physics itself. This deepens our understanding of microscopic systems like molecules, atoms, or even sub-atomic particles, ultimately leading to the discovery of new drugs, materials, and chemical production methods. At first sight, there seems to be a significant advantage compared to conventional computers, which struggle to store the complex quantum state of systems with many particles. As far back as 1981, physicist Richard Feynman ended a conference talk with a famous quote, hinting at the opportunities of quantum computing: 1 I’m not happy with all the analyses that go with just the classical theory, because nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical.