Tech Talk / By Martha Knight

Quantum computing is going to be disruptive, count on it.

Disruptive is good, now. A big breakthrough in technology is disruptive. It upsets the established order in a good way. Or at least in a good way for those persons and companies that embrace it, exploit it, get in on the ground floor.

A disruptive scientific discovery is good-disruptive, unlike a disruptive student who may get shunted into alternative education.

One thing that is disruptive about quantum computing is that it involves alternative states, which are nothing like alt ed.

Quantum computing involves units called qubits, pronounced Q-bits, which are nothing like QUIBIDS. The latter is an online bidding and purchasing program. I guess it could have been mildly disruptive to the marriage of the woman in the commercial whose husband “almost passed out” when she saved so much money at the bidding site.

Then there was the other woman who declared that QUIBIDS is the ree-ull dee-ull when she “won her first bid” after signing up. But there are those who are not convinced that quantum computing is.

D-Wave makes quantum computers, and it is here to tell you they are real. There aren’t many, so far, and owners and backers are of the magnitude of Google, NASA and Jeff Bezos. You have to wrap your head around some very different realities from those we have been used to, to even think about quantum computing.

What earlier breakthrough in computer technology has been as disruptive as this? Probably the microprocessor.

Quantum computing is about quantum superposition and quantum entanglement. A quantum computer offers possibilities of unimaginable processing power that would dwarf that of the most powerful “regular” computers in use today.

There has never been enough speed, has there? This is true of transportation. This is true of computers. A few years ago we started wanting math chips in addition to the main processors on motherboards, so as to offload calculation tasks onto them while the CPU kept doing other stuff. Now we want multi-core processors, all the cores working at once.

Today’s PCs have processing speeds measured in gigaflops (billions of floating-point operations per second). A 30-qubit quantum computer’s speed is10 teraflops (trillions of floating-point operations per second).

Paul Benioff made the first quantum Turing machine in 1981. But what is, or was, a Turing machine anyway?

That’s what Alan Turing came up with in 1930-sojmething. It posits a tape of infinite length marked off into squares (obviously, an infinite number of those). Each square is marked with a 1, or it isn’t. It is seen as having a value of 1, or no value.

Okay, that’s a digital system, right? Binary. Base 2. Something that reads and writes such values is needed. That can control machines to do—whatever.

A quantum Turing machine is different in that the tape and its squares are in a quantum state, and the read-write device reads and writes quantumly too. One value does not rule out the other. Every square is, potentially, simultaneously, a 1 and a naught and a neutral or undetermined value. Multiple calculations take place at any given time based on many bits with their many coexisting values.

So quantum computers encode information not in binary bits, yes or no, 1 or 0, but in quantum bits. Qubits.

What do qubits represent, that we have heard of and can reason about? Particles, ittybitty hunks of matter, atoms, ions, photons, electrons.

D-Wave computers handle dizzying quantities of ops (flops with those “power” prefixes, like giga and tera ahead of them) of processing power, and a whole new dimension of storage too—memory. Read-only memory, and random access memory.

The notion of qubits representing values of 1 and nothing, at the same time, is called superposition. The concept of those possibilities and neutry or nondefinition all being possible at once is referred to parallelism.

Benny Goodman’s hit “Gotta Be This or That” doesn’t apply. “If you ain’t wrong, you’re right. If it ain’t day, it’s night. If you ain’t sure, you might…” Jane Harvey wrote that, and no one argued that she wasn’t parallel enough. If it wasn’t Sis, it was your brother, and if it wasn’t full it was blank. “Can’t you see it’s gotta be One way or the other?”

Turing agreed. But in Quantum computing, the old axiom doesn’t apply.

There’s also entanglement. It takes two to tango, but lots more can entangle. As we all know (well, maybe not quite all), in quantum physics, if we apply force to two atoms they may become entangled, one of them assuming the properties of the other. A lone atom can spin any which way, not being influenced from outside, and can dance as if no one is watching. If disturbed (disrupted?), it will spin this way, or that, and the disturbing atom will spin in another way.

Sub-atomic particles in the mix make it even more interesting. Entanglement allows the properties or values to be looked at indirectly, whereas examining them directly would have influenced them.

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Speaking of spin and Benny Goodman, I must answer some questions a reader asked. “I picked up a turntable and a lot of records at a sale and am having a blast with them. But they need to be cleaned. Also some of the holes in the middle have been chipped and the records seem to wobble and go off pitch.”

Records can be washed in warm water with dish detergent (not dishwasher compound). Use a soft sponge or just swish them. Rinse in clear water with a little white vinegar. Let them air dry upright in a dish drainer rack or the rack in your dishwasher. After you have washed a few, feel the bottom of the dish pan or sink basin. Lots of grit, isn’t there! This grit destroys the grooves.

To fix the center hole, place the record on the turntable, centered correctly. Slip a notebook paper reinforcement ring over the spindle and onto the record. If it is the kind you have to moisten, dab a little water on the record, not the reinforcement. Press the reinforcement down firmly. Allow to dry. Then bandage the other side with another reinforcement.

Record changers damage center holes, so hand change, okay?