Military purchase first quantum computer 3600 times faster than digital one

[hab...@anony.net]

How can they be entangled in different times?

excerpt

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/18/quantum-mechanics-computing-speed

Consider some of the things that particle physicists believe. They
accept without batting an eyelid, for example, that one particular
subatomic particle, the neutrino, can pass right through the Earth
without stopping. They believe that a subatomic particle can be in two
different states at the same time. And that two particles can be
"entangled" in such a way that they can co-ordinate their properties
regardless of the distance in space and time that separates them (an
idea that even Einstein found "spooky"). And that whenever we look at
subatomic particles they are altered by the act of inspection so that,
in a sense, we can never see them as they are.

For as long as I have been paying attention to this stuff, the
academic literature has been full of arguments about quantum
computing. Some people thought that while it might be possible in
theory, in practice it would prove impracticable. But while these
disputes raged, a Canadian company called D-Wave � whose backers
include Amazon boss Jeff Bezos and the "investment arm" of the CIA (I
am not making this up) � was quietly getting on with building and
marketing a quantum computer. In 2011, D-Wave sold its first machine �
a 128-qubit computer � to military contractor Lockheed Martin. And
last week it was announced that D-Wave had sold a more powerful
machine to a consortium led by Google and Nasa and a number of leading
US universities.

What's interesting about this is not so much its confirmation that the
technology may indeed be a practical proposition, though that's
significant in itself. More important is that it signals the
possibility that we might be heading for a major step change in
processing power. In one experiment, for example, it was found that
the D-Wave machine was 3,600 times faster than a conventional computer
in certain kinds of applications. Given that the increases in
processing power enabled by Moore's law (which applies only to silicon
and says that computing power doubles roughly every two years) are
already causing us to revise our assumptions about what computers can
and cannot do, we may have some more revisions to do. All of which
goes to prove the truth of the adage: pure research is just research
that hasn't yet been applie