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Quantum Computers and Algorithms: Don’t ask me how, but it works?

Ronak Tiwari, Amir Hossein Moadab, Pavithra Sripathanallur Murali

Published Jan 1, 2024• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

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.

DOI
10.1287/ortm.2024.02.05

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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.
In 1959, Nobelist Richard Feynman gave a talk titled “There’s plenty of room at the bottom”, in which he emphasized that, to drastically speed up computations, we need to make computer components much smaller – all the way to the size of molecules, atoms, and even elementary particles. At this level, physics is no longer described by deterministic Newton’s mechanics, it is described by probabilistic quantum laws. Because of this, computer designers started thinking about how to design a reliable computer based on non-deterministic elements – and this thinking eventually led to the modern ideas and algorithms of quantum computing. So, we have a straight path of speeding up computations: by learning how to use molecules, atoms, and then elementary particles as building blocks of a computational device. But what if we reach the size of an elementary particle? At first glance, it may seem that we will then reach an absolute limit of how fast a computer can be. However, as we show in this paper, we can potentially speed up computations even further – by using the internal structure of elementary particles, e.g., the fact that protons and neutrons consist of quarks. Interestingly, the corresponding mathematics is very similar to what is called color optical computing – the use of light of different colors in computations.
Feynman is also widely credited with inventing the eld of nanotechnology with a famous lecture, “ere’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom,” delivered at the 1959 meeting of the American Physical Society held at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. e “nano” in nanotechnology comes from the Greek word for “dwarf” and we use it in the scientic unit of length-the nanometer-which is 1 billionth of a meter or 40 billionths of an inch. An atom of silicon, the stu Intel makes computer chips from, is approximately a quarter of a nanometer in diameter. In his lecture, Feynman speculated on new technologies that would evolve from man’s ability to manipulate matter on such nanometer-sized atomic scales.4 Feynman declared, “And it turns out that all of the information that man has carefully accumulated in all the books in the world can be written in this form in a cube of material one two-hundredth of an inch wide-which is the barest piece of dust that can be made out by the human eye. So there is plenty of room at the bottom!”
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.
What I want to talk about is the problem of manipulating and controlling things on a small scale…. It is a staggeringly small world that is below. In the year 2000, when they look back at this age, they will wonder why it was not until the year 1960 that anybody began seriously to move in this direction. Richard Feynman Richard Feynman and nanotechnology In 1959, in an after dinner speech at a meeting of the American Physical Society in Pasadena, Richard Feynman set out a remarkable vision of the future in a talk entitled ‘There's plenty of room at the bottom.’ The talk was subtitled ‘an invitation to enter a new field of physics’ and marked the beginning of what is now known as ‘nanotechnology’. Nanotechnology is concerned with the manipulation of matter at the scale of a nanometre -a thousand millionth of a metre. Atoms are typically a few tenths of a nanometre in size. Feynman emphasized that such an endeavour does not need new physics: I am not inventing anti-gravity, which is possible someday only if the laws are not what we think. I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven't yet gotten around to it. In his talk Feynman offered two prizes of $1000 each – one ‘to the first guy who makes an operating electric motor which is only 1/64 inch cube’, and a second ‘to the first guy who can take the information on the page of a book and put it on an area 1/25000 smaller’ He had to pay out on both prizes – the first less than a year later, to Bill McLellan, a Caltech alumnus.
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.