Daniel and Jorge Explain the UniverseWhat is a quantum computer and how does it work?
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So you know how sometimes in physics there's a word, and this word for people, it's like magic.
It means like big leap forward. It's like a huge transformation.
You mean, like dimensions.
Dimension is the worst, absolutely, yeah, stuff like that. And the one I'm thinking of in particular is the word quantum. Quantum mechanics obviously a huge transformation the way we think about the world, but it also seems to be a transformation in everything, like you can find like quantum massage, and you know, there's that whole television show Quantum Leap, and like all this stuff has nothing to do with quantum mechanics at all. It's just the word quantum seems to represent.
Some sort of high tech, the next.
Generation high tech fanciness.
You know, scien see.
Sometimes it really does represent a transformative leap. Sometimes there really is an opportunity to convert a normal version of something into the quantum version and then take a huge step forward.
And so that's what we wanted to talk about today after my quantum massage. Hold on, Hi, I'm Jorhee and I'm Daniel.
And this is our podcast Daniel and Jorge explain the universe, in.
Which we take the whole universe and chop it up in the little pieces, turn each of them into a quantum of understanding and download it into your brain.
And in which you feel like you understand and not understand at the same time.
No, we're going for one hundred percent understanding. We don't want to be one of those podcasts where you feel like, oh, I heard a lot of smart people talking about it, but I didn't really get it right.
Yeah. Yeah, because in this podcast you only listen to one intelligent person.
Joorhe and I together make one intelligent person.
We won't say which fraction of each, but together we are one smart guy.
We are quantum entangled in our intelligence.
That's right, that's right, And this is just the latest in our projects together. We also wrote a book called We Have No Idea, A guide did the unknown Universe, where we explore all the big questions in the universe, what doesn't physics know yet and what could it mean for humanity?
And if you search online on YouTube, you can also find a couple of the videos that we've made together about the Higgs boson, about dark matter, about gravitational waves. So check this out.
Yeah, so today we wanted to talk about quantum computers because we feel like it's a word that's bandied around and we wanted to make sure everybody understood what it actually means.
Think about whether you know what a quantum computer is.
So, as usual, I went out and I asked ten random people on the UCI campus if they knew what a quantum computer was and how it works. And remember some of these people are computer science undergraduates, so they really should know.
Here's what they had to say.
Nope and nope, you never heard of a quantum computer. All right, cool, I have no idea. Have you heard of a quantum computer?
This is the first time that I'm hearing it right now.
I'm not sure about how does it work, but I know that it has four main bits or alphabets, and it is set to revolutionalize the computer science work.
I don't know about a quantum computer, but you've heard of them.
I've heard the term, but I don't know much else about it other than that.
All right, So not an impressive performance here by UCI Underground.
That's right.
Well, hey, some of them are understood it, right, At least most of them had heard of it. The one guy had heard about quantum computers. The moment I said the phrase, it like exploded in his brain, like what, I've never heard of that until you mentioned it.
I've never heard those two words together.
You probably spend the next six hours googling it and reading about it, and maybe he's the next future quantum computing genius. We could have changed the course of human history through this podcast story. Oh my god, it's possible. But most people seem to have very little understanding of what a quantum computer is. Though you know, somebody out there has had some idea at least, so we feel like this is a good topic for a podcast. Let's clear out the weeds of everybody's understanding and make sure everybody knows what we're talking about.
When we say a quantum computer.
I mean everyone has heard of a computer, but a quantum computer that just sounds interesting, right.
What did you think of the first time you heard quantum computer? Do you think like a tiny computer the size of an atom?
What did I think? I thought that it was. I think I just had that Gudriye Channelso it's like a like a super new magic computer.
Right, Like I want a quantum ferrari.
I would just settle for my quantum mortgage to be paid first.
I love how the word quantum is just like taking on this magical mystical power, you know, and it's not bad. It's like no nuance or quantum that's bad. It's not like dark or dangerous. It's just like the new, fancy, glittery, shiny version of something.
The weird thing is that it's not a new word, right, Like, it's a word that's been around for one hundred years nearly, right.
Well, it's been around for a long time, and it's been applied to this kind of thing for about one hundred years. Yeah, quantum mechanics is almost one hundred years old. So the idea, the very basic ideas of quantum mechanics. You know, that the universe is chopped into pieces and not continuous. That's not a very new idea.
Right, Well, let's break it down. What does it mean when you say the word quantum like quantum physics or quantum particles. You know, what does it mean?
Well, the word basically just means portion or packet or unit.
You know, it's like a quantity, Like, yeah, quantity, quantum is that where sort of comes from?
Here?
It's connected why I think Orge just had a realization and you're live right there on the podcast. Yes, it's related to quantities, right. It says things that are quantized are things that are made out of little atomic pieces, things that can't be broken into smaller pieces. Right, So, like our money is quantized. We don't have money less than a penny, right, you can't spend less than a penny. That's the basic unit. Everything is built out of that, right. And it's relevant to physics because it turns out the universe is quantized, like particles are made out of smaller particles. You can't have like half a particle or three quarters of a particle. And energy levels are quantized, you know, the way electrons move around in nucleus. They can't just have like any arbitrary amount of energy, just like a ladder of energy levels they can be on and they can't be in between those steps.
But it kind of means more than just the idea of chopping things up into little bits. It's really more about what the world is like when you get down to those little little little bits. Quantum physics means the physics of those little little little particles, which is very different than the physics of like, you know, a basketball or a baseball.
That's right, that's what quantum means. It's little bit bits and quantum mechanics or quantum physics. It deals with how those things interact with each other. And it turns out that those little tiny bits of the universe interacting ways that are very unfamiliar to us. There's very little intuitive understanding we can grasp the way those things work because they follow very different rules than the thing than baseballs and basketballs follow. They follow more probabilistic rules, and your intuition that you develop through observing the way baseballs and basketballs move through the air doesn't work when you're talking about electrons or other little quantum particles because they follow different rules. Yeah, and those different rules lead to a very different kind of logic. In normal logic, you can say something like a switch is either on or off, but not both, right, But in quantum logic it's different, which is why quantum computing turns out to also be different.
Yeah, they don't behave like they do the big things behave, right, Like if you had a baseball the size of a quantum particle, you can just bounce it off of a wall.
That's right.
And the most important feature of these little quantum bits, and the one that's going to be relevant for quantum mechanics, is that we don't know everything about them. Like a baseball, you know everything you need to know. You know it's direction and you know it's velocity. From that, you can predict its future. If you know where it is and where it's going, you know where it's going to be.
Right.
For a quantum particle, like an electron, you can't observe it directly, and so there's some uncertainty about where it is, which means that it can be like here, or it can be there. But the crucial thing about a quantum particle is it's not actually in one place or the other and you just don't know it. It has a probability to be in both places. Our lack of knowledge about it reflects the fact that its location is not actually determined. It's like it could be over here and it could be over there, which means it's a little bit of both. And that's what I mean when I say the act in ways that are different from the ways that are normal things interact.
You know, a baseball is either here or it's.
There, right, But when you get down to that size, it doesn't look like it, Like, an electron doesn't look like a little tiny baseball.
Nobody knows what an electron looks like.
Yeah, Like when you try to zoom in, and you zoom in, it just becomes fuzzy, right, Like you just see this little fuzziness.
Right, Well, that's a whole other funny question, like what would an electron look like? Because an electron has.
Zero size, right, a zero volume, and so it doesn't really look like anything. But about the electrons fuzziness, we say the electron has a probability to be in a few different places. That's the fuzziness, but it's not determined before you ask. But when you want to interact with the electron, like if you want to measure where it is, then those probabilities collapse into a specific outcome. We call that collapsing the wave function, because remember electrons are particles, but they are controlled by wave equations, which determine the probability of being in various places.
Kind of like if you're not looking at it, it's sort of like a cloud almost, and then when you look at it, then boom, it's a little point that's right.
And this is the deep question of quantum mechanics that a lot of people don't understand. Most people don't understand. I think maybe everybody doesn't understand. How does that make any sense?
Right?
How does it make sense that something can be in both places at once until you ask, do you look at it? How does it make sense that you asking changes where it's going to be?
Right?
It's a situation, and that's there's a huge philosophical debate about that. You know, is it the asking that makes it decide where's it going to be? Or does the universe split into two options where you know, on one hand it's on the left and then the other universe it's on the right. And different people argue about this stuff for decades and decades, so it's certainly not something we can us in twenty minutes on a podcast. But the thing you need to know to understand quantum mechanics is that there's a probability for it to be in one place or the other, and that both probabilities exist simultaneously.
So if I'm not looking at the electron, it looks like a little fuzzy cloud, and you're saying that cloud is, it's kind of like it's in all those places at the same time with a certain probability.
Yeah, I think the most correct statement would say it has a probability to be in all those places. To say it actually is in all those places, I mean, it's not actually anywhere. It just has a probability to be those things. It's like the answer is not determined or known. It's not like God has it written down on a golden tablet somewhere. We just don't know. It's not actually anywhere. It just has a probability to be this or that. It's like, Wow, it's like a die you haven't rolled yet. It's not like it already is a four and you just haven't looked yet. You haven't rolled the die, so you don't there isn't an answer. The same way the electron has a probability distribution to be in various situations, but until you measure it, it's not in all of those at the same time, it just has probability to be in those things.
Oh man, so you're saying all of us, all of our particles are if you get down to that level, they're all unthrown dye.
Yes, exactly, wow, until you interact with them and forces the universe to throw the die. And that's one of the deep questions about econom mechanics is like.
Where's that die? Who's doing those random number process you know?
So when Einstein famously said God doesn't play dice, it's kind of true. It's like, really, things are all just unthrown dice.
Yeah, he didn't like that description of it at all. He really believed that the dice was already thrown. We just didn't know the answer, right.
That's a big difference.
That's a big difference.
And then eventually they proved that actually the dice is not yet thrown until you ask the question. Oh and that's a whole other podcast where we can talk about how they proved that. It's called the bell inequality, and it's a whole other topic we can get into it. But I think for today's episode, people just need to understand that a quantum particle can be different from classical particle, from like a thing you're you're understand because it can be kind of a probability to be in two different situations at the same time.
Okay, so that's that's what quantum means. And now let's get into quantum computers. But first let's take a break.
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All right, so that's what quantum means. It's like how the world behaves when you get down to those little tiny pits of the universe, which is totally different and kind of fuzzy and probabilistic. So now let's combine up with the word everyone knows, which is a computer. So what does it mean to like have a quantum computer.
Yeah, so the idea there is, let's build a computer, and let's build that out of pieces that can do these weird things, because then maybe it can solve problems that are otherwise hard. I mean, I think it's also important to think about how a normal computer works and like what does it mean to say a computer before we think about what is a quantum computer? And for those of you out there listening, you probably know what a computer is. You have one in your office or whatever. You bang on it, right, you download stuff and play Mario Kart or whatever. But what it's doing on the inside is really is that it's doing calculations. Right, A program on your computer is something that does a calculation. Maybe that calculation is how do I draw Mario Kart on the screen, or you know, how do I predict this the trajectory of this cannon ball that I want to fire at my opponent's castle or whatever. In the end, it's doing a calculation. And the way it does that calculation is that it represents the problem that needs to be solved in terms of a bunch of numbers, because all a computer really, in the end is doing is manipulating numbers. I mean, the memory in your computer is a bunch of ones and zeros. That is what we call bits, and those represent a number. And a computer is useful when you can take a problem you want to solve and represent it in a way that the computer knows how to solve it.
Right.
So, for example, how do I hit my baseball in a way that goes over the fence?
What angle is the best angle to do that? Right? So you want to solve that problem.
You first have to break it down into math and then have your computer basically act as a calculator and crunch those math equations.
And the kind of math you use to break it down depends on the kind of computer you have and the kind of calculations that computer can do.
So the kind of computers we use.
Classical computers have ones and zeros, and all they can do are a few basic logical operations on those ones and zeros they can do and they can do or they can do exo or nand and you can build those up to do all sorts of more complicated things like addition or subtraction or Mario Card and other video games.
Right, And the way it does that you're saying, is that it takes the problem, you know, where is Mario in Mario Card? Or how much is tupeless two, and then it breaks it down into bits which are ones and zeros. So everything that, like most of our language, all the math that we know about, all that can be essentially eventually breaking down into ones and zeros.
That's right, and we'll see later. The quantum computers don't use ones and zeros, and they have a different kind of logic, so they can solve different kinds of problems. And in the end, it's all about efficiency. Which kind of computer is faster at which kind of problem? Running Mario cards or breaking into the NSA does it take one second or does it take a billion years?
Well, let's talk a bit about why you want to break it down into ones and zeros, right, Like, white is that important? Because once break it down to ones and zeros, then even like a simple computer can then add and subtract those, Right Like, if you can break the whole world into ones and zeros and everything into simple operations like plus or minus, then you can have a machine basically do.
It Yeah, you can do simple logic operations on ones and zeros, and there's a theorem that shows that you can combine those to do any logical operation. So if you combine enough of those together, you can have any operation on your inputs. That doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way to do any problem. Like you might say, hey, I want to know where this baseball is going to go. So one way to do that is build a computer, have inside the computer a perfect model of how the baseball works, and do the calculation. Another way to do that is just hit the baseball. Right from that perspective, like a baseball is a computer that calculates one thing, how far does this baseball go?
Right.
It's very powerful, it's very fast, but it only does that one thing. The advantage of a classical computer with ones and zeros is that it can solve lots of different kinds of problems. They can do your baseball problem, and they can do Mario Kart right.
Okay, So that's the basis of regular computers. Like even the computer and the phone that people are listening to this podcast on, it's taking our voices, breaking them down to ones and zeros, chopping those up, mixing them up and then basically recreating our voices and flappy bird.
Right, that's right exactly. And so what is a quantum computer. Well, a quantum computer is a computer built out of different little pieces.
Right.
Whereas a normal computer uses ones and zero's, a quantum computer uses quantum mechanical objects that have different properties. They can be zero, they can be one, or they can be some combination of zero in one. The way a quantum particle is like, maybe it's here, maybe it's there. A quantum bit, what we call a q bit, is maybe zero, maybe one has a probability to be zero and a probability to be one. And again it's not secretly zero and cqs one Like a dice you've already rolled and you just haven't looked at. It's not determined. It's some combination of zero in some combination of that.
Oh, I see, what if you had a computer that was fundamental little processing unit is not just black and white, but maybe like some something in between, shades of gray, Yeah, shades of gray. Like what would happen if you add and mix those up and try to make calculations with things that can be not just ones and zeros.
Yeah, And so what happens is you get a very different kind of computer, one that's much better at things that classical computers find difficult, but also is worse at some things that classical computers find very easy. Right, Like what, Yeah, just a way, like a baseball is a good computer for calculating what a baseball does, it's not very good at organizing your recipes or doing Mario Kart, right. A quantum computer is built differently, but it still runs in the physical universe.
You know, all these things.
These computers are just ways to manipulate physical objects to represent calculations that we want done. That's what a computer is, right, And sometimes a classical computer is really good to that. A quantum computer, because it's made out of different things, is good at different kind of calculations. It's like, do you want to build your house out of wood or out of brick? Well, you know, wood is good for some things and brick is good for other things. You get a pretty different kind of house, right. So they're pretty different, but you know they're related, but they have different strengths, and those strengths and weaknesses come from the essential differences in how those bits work.
Okay, so let's get into some of these differences from where they come from. So, like, what's happening now instead of when I'm mixing these ce bits that's what they're called, right, the quantum bits, they're called cubids. Yeah, So what's happening when I mix them? Like if I do a calculation with these fuzzy bits?
Right, So there's really two things you have to understand about how quantum calculations work. First of all is that when you have two cbits, they're not independent. Okay, if you have two bits in a computer, then they can have four different states zero zero, zero, one, one zero or one one. Right, So two bits means two to the end different states. But you really just need two numbers to specify that, right. You need this the first number and the second number totally specifies the configuration. So it's really just two bits means two pieces of information for a classical computer, that's because those two bits are totally independent. For a quantum computer, the cubits are not independent. They're entangled, Okay, so they're connected to each other, and so you can have different states. You can have zero zero, you can have one to one, you can have some mixture of one zero and zero one.
You can have other mixtures of zero zero and zero one.
There's four combinations there, and what you get are you need four pieces of information to specify which state you're in. You have simultaneously some probability to be in zero zero, some probability to be in zero one, some probability being one zero, and some probability being one to one. So two cubits means four pieces of information needed to store the configuration. So two to the end pieces of information from two cubits right. Whereas in a classical computer, if there are n bits, there are two to the end different states, but you only need n pieces of information to specify the state. So if there are two bits, right, then there are four different states that can be in, but you only need two pieces of information to tell you exactly which state it's in. In a quantum computer with two cubits, you need to specify the probability of each of the two to the end different states it can be in at the same time, which means you need four pieces of information to totally nail down the state of a two cubit quantum computer.
Right, Because you're mixing two things that are that could be a wide range of things.
Right, that's right, because you not just have the things, you have the relationships between them. Right, So as the number of things grows, you have like thirty cubits, then you not just have what is the state of this bit? You have the state what is the relative state of these two things? How closely connected are they?
Right?
For example, thirty cubits, you need two to the thirty numbers to specify the state of that quantum system. And that that's very powerful because you know how many particles are there in the universe. There's like two to the three hundred particles in the universe. So a quantum computer that had three hundred cubits in it, right, that has as much information as like all the numbers of the particles in the entire universe.
Okay, boom, so a lot of information. Right.
Wait, So that just means that a simple operation in the quantum computer can represent a much bigger, sort of richer result. Is that kind of what it means? Like it's simple.
There's two different there's two pieces to a computer. There's the information in it and the operations you can do. Right Right now, we're just talking about the information in it. But yes, smaller quantum computer can represent much more information with a smaller number of bits.
Oh, I see, So like three hundred regular bits from a regular computer can maybe store the yes or no voting information from three hundred people, right, yeah, whereas three hundred quantum bids can store the information from basically the entire universe.
Now, let's be careful not to oversell it. It takes two to the three hundred numbers to specify the state of three hundred cubits. That's right, But that doesn't mean that a three hundred cubic computer can usefully store two to the three hundred pieces of information because, as we will talk about later, cubits have a very rich internal state, but the information is not as accessible as it is with classical bits.
Wow, Okay, Like with.
The electron that has lots of different probabilities, you only measure it in one of them. So if all the particles in the universe got together to vote on something, you'd still need a pretty big computer.
Who wants to exist, say Razor quantum.
I think Jorg should have another banana yes or no?
That's just the state of the system. Right.
Then there's the operation, and there's a there's another sort of magical thing that happens. Oh, I shouldn't say magic because none of it's magical. It seems like magic because it's so weird, but it's actually physics, right, And that's what happens when you do an operation. You know, in a normal computer, your operation is on like math, I'm going to add one and one and see what happens. Oh I get two. What happens when you do a quantum calculation. Remember that the states can be in the superposition of different states, right, it's like forty percent in state zero and sixty percent in state one.
Like it can be thirty percent white and seventy percent black. That's like one cubit right, right.
And it's not that it has the shade of gray, which is thirty percent white and seventy percent black. It has a probability to be white and a probability to be black. If you look at it, you can only see white or black. You'll never see gray.
Oh I see. But seventy percent of the time you'll see it as black and thirty percent you'll see it as white. Exactly, Oh I see. So it's not gray, it's just as a probability of being black or white.
That's right. When you do an operation, you don't it doesn't collapse to black or white and then do the operation. It does the operation on the probabilities themselves.
Okay, So you have the thirty percent of zero and thirty percent of one, or thirty percent of white and seventy percent of black or whatever, and you do the operation. It does the operation on the zero and it does the operation on the one at the same time. So it keeps both probabilities and it evolves them forward in time using quantum mechanics. So it's like doing two operations at once.
Is it kind of like, as we were saying earlier, a quantum bit is kind of like an unthrown dice, right, So it's like, what happens if I multiply this dyet that I haven't thrown times this dye that I also haven't thrown.
What's the result exactly?
And it needs to consider, well, you know, it might be two, and so what would happen if it were two?
Okay?
And what would happen if it was four? And what would happen if it were six? And it propagates all those forward simultaneously because the quantum state reflects all those probabilities, and a quantum operation moves all those operations, all those probabilities forward in time and effect doing all of those in parallel, So you have a massive amount of information density, plus you have massive parallelism to do these calculations.
It keeps all of those possibilities inside of this new combination of information, like you know, it's right, Like it has all the possibilities stored into this little imaginary multiplication.
That's right, and then the new state is some different arrangement of those possibilities, right, but it reflects all the probabilities in the previous state. Now here's an important place that a lot of people misunderstand quantum computers.
A lot of people say, oh.
Quantum computers are super powerful because they're basically infinitely parallel. You can do like a million calculations in parallel because of quantum mechanics.
Meaning it keeps all these probabilities sort of in its head.
Yeah, and it sort of seemed like magic, like you know, oh, I can try I can break passwords because I can try millions of things all the same time. Well that's not exactly true. I mean there's some truth to it, because there is parallelism in the quantum world, because you're keeping all these probabilities intact and you're operating on them and you're moving them all forward simultaneously. The problem is when you get the answer okay, you want to say, okay, I have my quantum state, I did my calculation. Now I want the answer, right, how do you measure that? When when you measure it, you're gonna get your black or you're white. You're gonna get.
Your zero or one.
You don't get all the information. You don't get all the probabilities. You just get one answer. You roll the dice, you get your four or you get your.
Six, and you look at it. You just get a number.
You just get a number.
Yeah, And so a lot of that information is lost, right, Huge amounts of that information is lost when you want to get the output from the quantum computer. And so that's why it's not really fair to say that it's this huge, massive parallelism. There is some parallelism there, and you can exploit it to do certain kinds of calculations, but in the end, most of the information is thrown away when you get the answer.
I see it's a much harder problem than you think.
Kind of, yeah, exactly, And so we've built this new thing. It's a bunch of you know, states that can be black or white, and they're all entangled and whatever. And then you can ask, can I use this to do anything? Can I represent some calculation I have in a way that this physical thing I built, this entangled combination of quantum states can effectively solve my problem right the way a classical computer can by representing in terms of math and zeros and ones or baseball, can solve that one single problem. Right, Can a quantum computer solve useful problems? That's the next question I see. Well, let's get into that, but let's take a quick break. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth, or enjoy a rich spoonful of Greek yogurt, you're probably not thinking about the environmental impact of each and every bite. But the people in the dairy industry are US Dairy has set themselves some ambitious sustainability goals, including being green house gas neutral by twenty to fifty. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. Take water. For example, most dairy farms reuse water up to four times. The same water cools the milk, cleans equipment, washes the barn, and irrigates the crops. How is US dairy tackling greenhouse gases? Many farms use anaerobic digestors that turn the methane from maneuver into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. So the next time you grab a slice of pizza or lick an ice cream cone, know that dairy farmers and processors around the country are using the latest practices and innovations to provide the nutrient dense dairy products we love with less of an impact. Visit us dairy dot com slash sustainability to learn more.
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Okay, So let's say that I build a quantum computer and you're saying it's not going to be great for playing Mario Kart unless you're playing Quantum Maricard.
Quantum marit card is awesome, Yeah, because you're both like a dead and alive at the same time.
Right, But it wouldn't be useful for like, you know, playing Flabbybird on your phone or surfing Facebook. So what what would it be good of? What are people excited about making quantum computers?
Yeah? Well, it took a while for people to figure this out.
You know, people thought about the idea of quantum computers a few decades ago, like, Okay, the world is built in a quantum way, maybe our computers should be quantum. And then it took a few decades for people to come up with ideas for how to actually use them. Like I mean, take a problem, I have map it into something that can be represented with a quantum state, so that when I do this experiment on it, do these operations on it, the output of that experiment is basically answered to my question.
Right. I remember, that's sort of what we're thinking of as a as a computer.
Right, because you can't just pretend to be making a quantum computer. You actually have to build it out of quantum things, things that are quantum raight, Like you know what I mean, Like I can't just like add all these probabilities in my on my regular computer, Like the computer itself has to be made out of quantum things.
Right, Well, you know everything in the universe is made out of quantum things, right, so in that sense, you are a quantum computer or.
Hey, that's right, Yeah, I am spectacular.
And so one of the first things that people figured out was that there's an algorithm you can write down for factorizing big integers that says, take an integer and break it all into its factors. You know, like fifteen is five times three. That's obvious, but what if you had a really big number. It's hard to necessarily know how to break down you know, one, two, three, four, seven, eight, ten into all of its factors. It's a hard, hard thing. It takes a while to do.
You mean, like thirty can be five time SAgs where it can be three times ten, right.
Yeah, Well you want to break it down to all of its fundamental factors, and so thirty is two times three times five. Right, there's one unique set of factors for every integer, and that's not easy to do. Right for big numbers, it could take a while because you basically just have to check them. And this some slightly more clever algorithms using normal computers. But normal computers it takes a long time for them to do this because they have to cycle through all the different possibilities.
So you mean, like, if I told you, like seventeen million, three hundred four thousand, seven hundred and ninety nine, tell me all the numbers that can multiply into.
That number exactly.
That would be a hard problem.
It would be a hard problem for me and a slow problem for a classical computer. But there was a guy who figured out how to write an algorithm to use these quantum states, how to represent that problem on a quantum computer, right, so that you can manipulate that computer and out get the answer. And the way he did it, the algorithm that he came up with is much much faster on a quantum computer than on a normal computer because it's using the parallelism. It's like, let me represent this number, how to build this number in lots of different ways and then push all those forwards simultaneously. And so he came up with an algorithm to do this. And this is a big deal because the fact that this is really hard for normal computers is the basis of a lot of modern cryptography.
Meaning like how passwords are encoded, that they use this idea of factoring large numbers.
That's right.
If you can instantly factorize a large number, then you can break a lot of modern cryptography. You can get into the Department of Defense and the IRS and all that stuff, because all of those things, their cryptography, their protection, their cyber protection, assumes that it would take a long time to factorize a large number. Cryptography is based on the idea that let's find problems that are hard to solve but.
Easy to check.
Right, Like, if you give me a big number and you asked me to find the factors, it might be take me a long time to find them, but once I had them, I could verify very quickly that they were correct.
It just had to walk them together. Do I get the right answer?
Like it's hard to get two times three times five from thirty, but it's easy to verify that two times three times five is equal to thirty.
Yeah, exactly.
And so if you can find a faster way to do these things, then you break this assumption that's in most modern cryptography, not all, but most modern cryptography is based on the idea that these things are hard to find but easy to check. So quantum computers and theory can do this much much faster because of the way they're constructed. So again, they're better at some problems, like specialized problems, not necessarily better at everything though.
Right, not that I would ever have any need to break into the irs or anything like that. Right, It's make that clear in case there's any auditors listening here. But so, how far away are we from getting there? Like, what's the current state of the art in terms of making quantum computers.
We have quantum computers.
People have built cubits, individual ones, and they've built sets of cubits together. You know, they're up to probably by the time this podcast comes out, the numbers will be irrelevant. But you know, there are ten cubic computers out there, fifteen cubic computers. There are even ones you can access online. IBM has one that's connected to the.
Web, meaning you can talk to that. This quantum compute computer they have, you can ask it questions.
Yeah, but it's hard because you have to get these cubits built, and then you have to get them to be stable, and sometimes these things fall apart. I mean, the basic principle of a quantum computer works if it's in isolation, but no computer is really in isolation.
Interacts with the environment and.
So it gets messed up, I see. And so these things are really finicky. They're not easy to build, and so we're still getting good at building the bits.
Like if you look at it, it'll collapse into black or white, so you have to really protect it from anyone looking at your quantum computer until you actually want the answer exactly.
Yeah, So technically these things are really tricky, but you know, technical problems get solved, and when there's a lot of money at stake, a lot of people work on them. And so I think quantum computers are going to come pretty rapidly and get larger and larger and more complicated. And so you know, we're at the point where we have ten fifteen cubic computers. They don't last for very long, so you can't do long complicated calculations on them.
They're huge, right, Like they take up the space of a room the.
Way classical computers used to. You know, you look at a picture of a classical computer from nineteen sixty it could like do less than your iPhone and it filled up a whole room, right.
Whoa you might one day have a quantum computer in your phone, like maybe right in fifty years.
Yeah, perhaps if you needed to do that kind of stuff. Yeah, you know, I if I poop poo the applications of quantum computers, then I risk going down in history as like one of those guys who.
Said computers have a very specialized use. You might sell five or six worldwide.
Nobody can ever predict how these things are going to change society and how people think to use them.
Nobody wants to be that guy.
No one wants to be that guy, right they pooh poo are But yeah, I think the future holds a big promise for quantum computers, and I think they'll crack open new kinds of problems that were hard before. So far, there's sort of a limited set of problems and quantum computers can solve. It's like it's just a new toy and we're trying to figure out exactly how to use it. It's definitely a new fun kind of thing physics are having fun putting together. But it's not like it can speed up every problem. Some people think, oh, quantic computers make everything faster. That's not the case.
So it's not gonna be like a quantum lead. It'll be more like a quantum skit.
Are you saying it'd be more like a quantum massage?
You know.
Whatever that means?
Oh my gosh. Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this deep dive into quantum computers.
Yeah, And if you have questions about what we said and you didn't understand it, please send us feedback to Feedback at.
Daniel and Jorge dot com.
And if you have another question you think we would take apart nicely you'd like to hear us talk about, send that to us as well.
Or if you just want Daniel to give you a massage, just write us at Quantum Massage at Daniel Moor dot com.
That's right, I'll give you one bit of massage.
Want them bit? All right? Thanks everyone for listening and tune in next time.
See you next time.
If you still have a question after listening to all these explanations, please drop us a line. We'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge that's one word, or email us at feedback at Danielandorge dot com. When you pop a piece of cheese into your mouth. You're probably not thinking about the environmental impact, but the people in the dairy industry are. That's why they're working hard every day to find new ways to reduce waste, conserve natural resources, and drive down greenhouse gas emissions. House US dairy tackling greenhouse gases. Many farms use anaerobic digestors to turn the methane from manure into renewable energy that can power farms, towns, and electric cars. Visit you as dairy dot COM's Last Sustainability to learn more.
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