James Woodward reports in The Scotsman that a team of Bristol University scientists are claiming the worlds first optical quantum chip. Cherry Lewis, the project spokesperson, said: "We are almost getting to the point now where conventional computers cannot go any smaller so we need to go down a completely new route. We are talking nano-scale. Particles of light." This may mean that in the near future computers (an their users) will be able to benefit from concepts such as:
- qubits - these are the equivalent of bits in traditional computing, but may have more than two states at the same time
- quantum parallelism - the ability of a quantum computer with a single processor to carry out parallel operations
- quantum superposition - any object can be in every possible state simultaneously
- quantum entanglement – particles are able to interact with each other regardless of the distance between them
- quantum registers – controlled groups of qubits
Of course, it may be a little while until any of these are actually on the market, but what any programmer can obtain is a quantum computer simulator