February 28th, 2012, 6:09 pm
QuoteOriginally posted by: outrunI alway had this hunch that one could factor composite numbers with single photon interference, a cascade of half mirors, standing wave, and measuring path segments and see if that path segment observation affects the standing wave that maps A,B to A*B and back.Vague, isnt it? The parallelism would be in the cascade of possible paths the single photon takes, so it's not 'entangled state parallelism' but 'spatial path parallelism'I'm sure you can do something like this for small numbers but I've always been a bit skeptical about the scaling of QM computing to useful numbers of qubits. If one wants to factor something useful like a 1024 bit number into two O(512-bit) primes, one might need to create standing waves or path segment geometries accurate to better than 2 parts in 10^-154 to distinguish between closely-spaced candidate prime factors.It seems to me that the ability to create an N-qubit system, apply an M-step algorithm, and then read the outcome across the 2^N states becomes exponentially harder as N and M grow. In other words, scaling quantum computing may be no easier than scaling regular computing.But I'd love to be proven wrong!
Last edited by
Traden4Alpha on February 27th, 2012, 11:00 pm, edited 1 time in total.