Updates from Derren Brown and the Enigma Crew

The world’s first universal programmable quantum computer has been put through its paces. But the test program revealed significant hurdles that must be overcome before the device is ready for real work.

Earlier in the year, a team at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, built a quantum computer capable of processing two quantum bits, or qubits. Qubits store more information than the simple “on” or “off” bits of conventional computing, which means that a quantum computer outperform conventional computers in tasks such ascryptanalysis.

As in a classical computer, a series of logic gates processes the information – although here the gates are quantum logic, or qubit, gates. “For example, a simple single-qubit gate would change a ‘one’ to a ‘zero’ and vice versa,” says David Hanneke, a member of the team. But unlike the physical logic gates of a classical computer, the quantum logic gates used in the team’s device are each encoded into a laser pulse.

Full article at New Scientist