I regularly track about half a dozen startups that have interesting breakthrough technologies.
One such candidate is D-Wave, a Canadian, Vancouver-based company, who had the good sense to turn to Ukrainian and Russian scientists (after the fall of the Soviet Union) for the core technology to help them invent the "quantum computer" an accomplishment that experts have predicted would not happen till 2020-2025.
ABC News is reporting that D-Wave, today will announce a working prototype of a quantum computer -the holy grail of next generation computing, obsolescing today's relatively slow silicon-based analog and digital computers.
The prototype is the size of a large freezer and super-cooled to near absolute zero, thanks to research and core technology developed at the Institute for Low Temperature Physics in Ukraine.
They are actually one year ahead of schedule -- they previously disclosed that a working prototype won't be available till 2008.
"There are certain classes of problems that can't be solved with digital computers," said Herb Martin, the firm's CEO, "Digital computers are good at running programs; quantum computers are good at handling massive sets of variables."
D-Wave says it has built a quantum computer with 16 qubits - the quantum world's version of a digital bit, but which simultaneously encodes 1 and 0, so can carry more information and solve problems more quickly.
According to D-Wave CTO Dr Geordie Rose, the firm's roadmap calls for the construction of a 1,000 qubit machine in 2008.
Rose goes on to explain
"The first application is a pattern matching application applied to searching databases of molecules. This is an app that we developed internally at D-Wave. This is an example of how to apply Orion to problems arising from association (or conflict) graphs."
"The second is a third-party planning/scheduling application for assigning people to seats subject to constraints. Anyone who has tried to plan seating arrangements for a wedding should be familiar with this one. This is an example of applying Orion to constraint satisfaction problems."
"One very cool thing that we're planning to do in Q2/2007 is to provide free access to one of these systems to people who want to either develop or port applications to it…so if you have an idea for an app that needs a fast NP-complete problem solver, start thinking about what you could do with some serious horsepower."
Future Applications of (1000 qubit or more )computers:
- climate change modeling
- energy modeling
- biological DNA computing
- logistics problems
- long term (6 month to one year) weather forecasting
- modeling and designing new genetically based drugs
- bioinformatics
- advanced cryptography, nano-forensics, and security / code-breaking
- post 9/11 security,, biometrics
- nano manufacturing
- other complex, dynamic systems
ETA: Now 2007 for early adopters, widespread and mainstream by 2017-2020?
Full story>> [...] and a story from the Register on the same topic ..thanks to Mike Kulyk for the heads up on the added information.
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