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Old 02-28-2012, 11:19 PM
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ceptimus ceptimus is offline
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Join Date: Aug 2004
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Default Re: Moore's Law original issue! OMG!

It's a bit like the double-slit experiment where you fire one particle through the slits. The probability of where it lands implies that it has to 'sniff out' both possible routes through the slits - though it can only actually pass through one of them. This can be extended to 3, 4, ... n slits - the single particle has to somehow 'traverse' all the possible routes so that it knows the probabilities that it will land at all the different places on the screen (or detector). It can only traverse one route, classically, but it behaves as though it's aware of all the other possibilities.

This doesn't make any sense from a classical point of view. One way of understanding what happens is to imagine that there are lots of different parallel universes and that in each universe the particle takes a different route. The final position where the particle lands in our universe then implies that it somehow has knowledge (up until we measure where it is) of what is going on with its brother particles in all the other universes.

The quantum computer uses the same idea - we encode the problem in one or more quantum bits - these bits could be, for example, the polarization or spin of some particles. Then the particles do their weird quantum stuff inside the computer, and when we measure the result we see what happened to them. The fact that the quantum computer is many times faster than a classical one can then be explained by the many copies of the quantum computer existing in all the parallel universes. Say there are 1000 parallel universes - that's like having 1000 classical computers all working together on the same problem at the same time.
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Thanks, from:
Ensign Steve (02-28-2012), SR71 (02-28-2012)
 
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