Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - What Is A Quantum Computer?

Episode Date: January 8, 2019

What is a quantum computer and how does it work? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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It's like a huge transformation. You mean like dimensions? Dimension is the worst, absolutely, stuff like that. And the word I'm thinking of in particular is the word quantum. Quantum mechanics, obviously a huge transformation in the way we think about the world, but it also seems to be a transformation in everything. Like you can find like quantum massage and, you know, there's that whole television show, Quantum Leap and like all this stuff has nothing to do with quantum mechanics at all.

It's just the word quantum seems to represent some sort of high-tech. Next-generation high-tech fanciness, you know? Sciencey. Sometimes it really does represent a transformative leap. Sometimes there really is an opportunity to convert a normal version of something into the quantum version and then take a huge step forward. And so that's what we wanted to talk about today. After my quantum massage. Hold on. Hi, I'm Jorge.

And I'm Daniel. And this is our podcast. Daniel and Jorge explain the universe. In which we take the whole universe and chop it up in the little pieces, turn each of them into a quantum of understanding and download it into your brain. And in which you feel like you understand and not understand at the same time. No, we're going for a hundred percent understanding. we don't want to be one of those podcasts where you feel like

oh I heard a lot of smart people talking about it but I didn't really get it right yeah yeah because in this podcast you only listen to one intelligent person Jorge and I together make one intelligent person we won't say which fraction of each but together we are one smart guy we are quantum entangled in our intelligence that's right that's right and this is just the latest in our projects together we also wrote a book called We Have No Idea, a guide to the unknown universe where we explore all the big questions in the universe. What doesn't physics know yet and what could it mean for humanity?

And if you search online on YouTube, you can also find a couple of the videos that we've made together about the Higgs boson, about dark matter, about gravitational waves. So check those out. Yeah. So today we wanted to talk about quantum computers, because we feel like it's a word that's bandied around, and we wanted to make sure everybody understood what it actually means. Think about whether you know what a quantum computer is. So, as usual, I went out and I asked 10 random people on the UCI campus if they knew what a quantum computer was and how it works. And remember, some of these people are computer science undergraduates, so they really should know. Here's what they had to say.

Nope. And nope. You never heard of a quantum computer? No. All right, cool. I have no idea. Have you heard of a quantum computer? This is the first time that I'm hearing it right now I'm not sure about how does it work but I know that it has four main bits or alphabets

and it is said to revolutionize the computer science one I don't know about a quantum computer but you've heard it I've heard the term but I don't know much else about it other than that All right so not an impressive performance here by UCI undergrad That's right well hey some of them understood but at least most of them had heard of it. The one guy heard about quantum computers

the moment I said the phrase it exploded in his brain. Like, what? I've never heard of that until you mentioned it. I've never heard those two words together. I know. You probably spend the next six hours Googling it and reading about it

and maybe he's the next future quantum computing genius. We could have changed the course of human history through this podcast, Jorge. Oh, my God. It's possible. But most people seem to have very little understanding of what a quantum computer is.

though, you know, somebody out there had some idea, at least. So we feel like this is a good topic for a podcast. Let's clear out the weeds of everybody's understanding and make sure everybody knows what we're talking about when we say a quantum computer. I mean, everyone has heard of a computer, but a quantum computer, that just sounds interesting, right? What did you think of the first time you heard quantum computer?

Did you think, like, a tiny computer the size of an atom? What did I think? I thought that it was, I think I just had that gut reaction also. It's like a super new magic computer. Right. Like, I want a quantum Ferrari. I would just settle for my quantum mortgage to be paid first. I love how the word quantum is just like taken on this magical, mystical power, you know?

And it's not bad. It's like no nuance to quantum that's bad. It's not like dark or dangerous. It's just like the new fancy, glittery, shiny version of something. The weird thing is that it's not a new word, right? Like, it's a word that's been around for 100 years, nearly, right? Well, it's been around for a long time, and it's been applied to this kind of thing for about 100 years. Yeah, quantum mechanics is almost 100 years old.

So the idea, the very basic ideas of quantum mechanics, you know that the universe is chopped into pieces and not continuous, that's not a very new idea. Right. Well, let's break it down. What does it mean when you say the word quantum, like quantum physics or quantum? particles, you know, what does it mean? Well, the word basically just means portion or packet or unit, you know, it's... Like a quantity, like a quantity, quantum, is that where it sort of comes from? Yeah.

It's connected. Well, I think Jorge just had a realization, live right there on the podcast. Yes, it's related to quantities, right? It says things that are quantized are things that are made out of little atomic pieces, things that can't be broken into smaller pieces, right? So like our money is quantized We don't have money less than a penny You can't spend less than a penny

It's the basic unit Everything is billed out of that And it's relevant to physics Because it turns out the universe is quantized Like particles are made out of smaller particles You can't have like half a particle Or three quarter of a particle And energy levels are quantized

You know the way electrons move around a nucleus They can't just have like any arbitrary amount of energy There's like a ladder of energy levels They can be on and they can't be in between those steps. But it kind of means more than just the idea of chopping things up into a little bit. It's really more about what the world is like when you get down to those little, little, little bits. Quantum physics means the physics of those little, little, little particles,

which is very different than the physics of like, you know, a basketball or a baseball. That's right. That's what quantum means, it's little bits. And quantum mechanics or quantum physics, it deals with how those things interact with each other. And it turns out that those little tiny bits of the universe interact in ways that are very unfamiliar to us. There's very little intuitive understanding we can grasp of the way those things work

because they follow very different rules than baseballs and basketballs follow. They follow more probabilistic rules. And your intuition that you develop through observing the way baseballs and basketballs move through the air doesn't work when you're talking about electrons or other little quantum particles because they follow different rules, yeah.

And those different rules lead to a very different kind of logic. You see, in normal logic, you can say something like a switch is either on or off, but not both, right? But in quantum logic, it's different, which is why quantum computing turns out to also be different. Yeah, they don't behave like they do, the big things behave, right? Like if you had a baseball the size of a quantum particle, you couldn't just bounce it off a wall. That's right. And the most important feature of these little quantum bits and the one that's going to be relevant for quantum. mechanics is that we don't know everything about them.

Like a baseball, you know everything you need to know. You know its direction and you know its velocity. From that, you can predict its future. If you know where it is and where it's going, you know where it's going. For a quantum particle, like an electron, you can't observe it directly. And so there's some uncertainty about where it is, which means that it can be like here or it can be there. But the crucial thing about a quantum particle is it's not actually in one place or the other

and you just don't know it, it has a probability to be in both places. Our lack of knowledge about it reflects the fact that its location is not actually determined. It's like it could be over here and it could be over there, which means it's a little bit of both. And that's what I mean when I say they act in ways that are different from the ways that normal things interact. You know, a baseball is either here or it's there. Right.

But when you get down to that size, it doesn't look like an electron doesn't look like a little tiny baseball. nobody knows what an electron looks like yeah like when you try to zoom in and you zoom in it just becomes fuzzy right like you just see this little fuzziness right well that's a whole other funny question like what would an electron look like because an electron has zero size right zero volume and so it doesn't really look like anything but about the electron's fuzziness we say the electron

has a probability to be in a few different places that's the fuzziness but it's not determined before you ask But when you want to interact with the electron, like if you want to measure where it is, then those probabilities collapse into a specific outcome. We call that collapsing the wave function because remember electrons are particles, but they are controlled by wave equations

which determine the probability of being in various places. Kind of like if you're not looking at it, it's sort of like a cloud almost. And then when you look at it, then boom, it's a little point. That's right. And this is the deep question of quantum mechanics that a lot of people don't understand. most people don't understand.

I think maybe everybody doesn't understand. How does that make any sense, right? How does it make sense that something can be in both places at once until you ask? Until you look at it. How does it make sense that you asking changes where it's going to be, right? It's a situation. And there's a huge philosophical debate about that. Wow.

Is it the asking that makes it decide where it's going to be? Or does the universe split into two options where, you know, on one hand it's on the left and the other universe, it's on the right. Different people argue about this stuff for decades and decades. So it's certainly not something we can address in 20 minutes on a podcast. But the thing you need to know to understand quantum mechanics is that there's a probability for it to be in one place or the other and that both probabilities exist simultaneously.

So if I'm not looking at the electron, it looks like a little fuzzy cloud. You're saying that cloud is kind of like it's in all those places at the same time with a certain probability. Yeah, I think the most correct statement would say it has a probability to be in all of those places. To say it actually is in all those places, I mean, it's not actually anywhere. It just has a probability to be those things. It's like the answer is not determined or known. It's not like God has it written down on a golden tablet somewhere we just don't know.

It's not actually anywhere. It just has a probability to be this or that. It's like a dye you haven't rolled yet. It's not like it already is a four and you just haven't looked yet. You haven't rolled the die, so there isn't. an answer. The same way, the electron has a probability distribution to be in various situations, but until you measure it, it's not in all of those at the same time. It just has a probability to be in those different states. Oh, man. So you're saying all of us, all of our

particles are, if you get down to that level, they're all unthrown die. Yes, exactly. Wow. Until you interact with them and forces the universe to throw the die. And that's one of the deep questions about quantum mechanics. It's like, where's that die? Who's doing those random number of bosses, you know? Wow. So when Einstein famously said, God doesn't play dice, it's kind of true. It's like, really, things are all just unthrown dice. Yeah, he didn't like that description of it at all. He really believed that the dice was already thrown. We just didn't know the answer, right? That's a big difference. That's a big difference. And then eventually they proved that actually the dice is not yet thrown until you ask the question.

And that's a whole other podcast we can talk about how they prove that. It's called the Bell Inequality. And it's a whole other topic we can get into. But I think for today's episode, people just need to understand that a quantum particle can be different from a classical particle from like a thing you understand because it can be a probability to be in two different situations at the same time. Okay, so that's what quantum means. And now let's get into quantum computers. But first, let's take a break. Hello, it's Honey German, and my podcast,

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right, so that's what quantum means. It's like how the world behaves when you get down to those little tiny bits of the universe, which is totally different and kind of fuzzy and probabilistic. So now let's combine it with the word everyone knows, which is a computer. So what does it mean to have a quantum computer? Yeah, so the idea there is let's build a computer

and let's build out of pieces that can do these weird things because then maybe you can solve problems that are otherwise hard. I mean, I think it's also important to think about how a normal computer works and what does it mean to say a computer before we think about what is a quantum computer. And for those of you out there listening, you probably know what a computer is. You have one in your office or whatever.

You bang on it, right? you download stuff and play Mario Card or whatever. But what it's doing on the inside is really that it's doing calculations, right? A program on your computer is something that does a calculation. Maybe that calculation is, how do I draw Mario Card on the screen? Or, you know, how do I predict the trajectory of this cannonball that I want to fire at my opponent's castle or whatever? In the end, it's doing a calculation.

And the way it does that calculation is that it represents the problem that needs to be solved in terms of a bunch of numbers. because all a computer really in the end is doing is manipulating numbers. I mean, the memory on your computer is a bunch of ones and zeros. Those are what we call bits, and those represent a number.

And a computer is useful when you can take a problem you want to solve and represent it in a way that the computer knows how to solve it, right? Right. So for example, how do I hit my baseball in a way that goes over the fence? What angle is the best angle to do that, right?

So you want to solve that problem. But you first have to break it down into math and then have your computer basically act as a calculator and crunch those math equations. And the kind of math you use to break it down depends on the kind of computer you have and the kind of calculations that computer can do. So the kind of computers we use,

classical computers, have ones and zeros. And all they can do are a few basic logical operations on those ones and zeros. They can do and, they can do or, they can do XOR or an and. And you can build those up to do all sorts of more complicated things like addition or subtraction or Mario Card and other video games. Right. And the way it does that you're saying is that

it takes the problem, you know, where is Mario in Mario Card or how much is 2 plus 2? And it breaks it down into bits, which are ones and zeros. So everything that, like most of our language, all the math that we know about, all of that can be essentially, eventually breaking down into ones and zeros. That's right. And we'll see later, the

Quantum computers don't use ones and zeros. And they have a different kind of logic so they can solve different kinds of problems. Right. And in the end, it's all about efficiency. Which kind of computer is faster at which kind of problem? Running Mario Kart or breaking into the NSA. Does it take one second or does it take a billion years?

Well, let's talk a bit about why you want to break it down into ones and zeros, right? Like why is that important? Because once you break it down to ones and zeros, then even like a simple computer can then add and suburb. track those, right? Like if you can break the whole world to ones and zeros and everything into simple operations like plus or minus, then you can have a machine basically do it. Yeah, you can do simple logic operations on ones and zeros. And there's a theorem that shows that you can combine those to do any logical operation. So if you combine enough of those together, you can have any

operation on your inputs. That doesn't mean it's necessarily the best way to do any problem. You might say, hey, I want to know where this baseball is going to go. So one way to do that is build a computer, have inside the computer a perfect model of how the baseball works, and do the calculation. Another way to do that is just hit the baseball, right? From that perspective, like a baseball is a computer that calculates one thing, how far does this baseball go, right? It's very powerful, it's very fast, but it only does that one thing. The advantage of a classical computer with ones and zeros is that it can. can solve lots of different kinds of problems.

It can do your baseball problem and you can do Mario Kart. Right. Okay, so that's the basis of regular computers. Like, even the computer and the phone that people are listening to this podcast on, it's taking our voices, breaking them down to ones and zeros, chopping those up, mixing them up, and then basically recreating our voices and a flappy bird, right? That's right, exactly. And so what is a quantum computer?

Well, a quantum computer is a computer built at a different little piece. Whereas a normal computer uses 1s and 0 is a quantum computer uses quantum mechanical objects that have different properties. They can be 0, they can be 1, or they can be some combination of 0 and 1. The way a quantum particle is like maybe it's here, maybe it's there, a quantum bit, what we call a Q bit, is maybe 0, maybe 1. It has a probability to be 0 and a probability to be 1. And again, it's not secretly 0 and secretly 1, like a dice you've already rolled and you just have and looked at, it's not determined. It's some combination of zero and some

combination of one. Oh, I see. What if you had a computer that was fundamental little processing unit is not just black and white, but maybe like something in between shades of gray as well? Shades of gray.

Like what would happen if you add and mix those up and try to make calculations with things that can be not just ones and zeros? Yeah, and so what happens is you get a very different kind of computer, one that's much better at things that classical computers find difficult, but also is worse at some things that classical computers find

very easy, right? Like what? Yeah, just the way like a baseball is a good computer for calculating what a baseball does. It's not very good at organizing your recipes or doing Mario Kart, right? A quantum computer is built differently, but it still runs in the physical universe. You know, all these things, these computers are just ways to manipulate physical objects to represent calculations that we want done. That's what a computer is, right?

And sometimes a classical computer is really good at that. A quantum computer, because it's made out of different things, is good at a different kind of calculations. It's like, do you want to build your house out of wood or out of brick? Well, you know, wood is good for some things and brick is good for other things. You get a pretty different kind of house. So they're pretty different. But, you know, they're related, but they have different strengths.

And those strengths and weaknesses come from the essential differences in how those bits work. Okay, so let's get into some of these differences in where they come from. So, like, what's happening now instead of when I'm mixing these qubits? That's what they're called, right? The quantum bits are called qubits. Yeah. So what's happening when I mix them? Like, if I do a calculation with these fuzzy bits.

Right. So there's really two things you have to understand about how quantum calculations work. First of all, is that you, when you have two qubits, they're not independent. Okay? If you have two bits in a computer, then they can have four different states. Zero, zero, zero, one, one, zero, or one. one, right? So two bits means two to the end different states. But you really

just need two numbers to specify that, right? You need the first number and the second number. Totally specifies the configuration. So it's really just two bits means two pieces of information for a classical computer. That's because those two bits are totally independent. For a quantum computer, the qubits

are not independent. They're entangled. So they're connected to each other. And so you can have different states. You can have zero, zero. You can have one, one. You can have some mixture of one, zero, and zero one. You can have other mixtures of zero and zero one. There's four combinations there.

And what you get, you need four pieces of information to specify which state you're in. You have simultaneously some probability to be in zero, some probability being zero one, some probability being zero one, and some probability being one-one. So two qubits means four pieces of information needed to store the configuration. So two to the end pieces of information from two qubits, right? Whereas in a classical computer, if there are n bits, there are two to the n different states. But you only need n pieces of information to specify the state. So if there are two bits, right, then there are four different states it can be in, but you only need two pieces of information to tell you exactly which state it's in.

In a quantum computer with two qubits, you need to specify the probability of each of the two Two to the end different states it can be in at the same time, which means you need four pieces of information to totally nail down the state of a two-cubit quantum computer. Right, because you're mixing two things that could be a wide range of things, right? That's right, because you not just have the things, you have the relationships between them, right? So as the number of things grows, if you have like 30 cubits, then you not just have what is the state of this bit, you have the state, what is the relative state of these two things? How closely connected are they?

connected are they? Right. So if you have, for example, 30 cubits, you need two to the 30 numbers to specify the state of that quantum system. And that's very powerful because, you know, how many particles are there in the universe? There's like two to the 300 particles in the universe. So a quantum computer that had 300 cubits in it, right? It has as much information as, like, all the numbers of the particles in the entire universe.

boom so it's a lot of information right wait so that just means that a simple operation in a quantum computer can represent a much bigger sort of richer result is that kind of what it means like it's simple there's two different there's two pieces to a computer there's the information in it and the operations you can do right

right now we're just talking about the information in it but yes a smaller quantum computer can represent much more information with a smaller number of bits. Oh, I see. So, like, 300 regular bits from a regular computer can maybe store the yes or no voting information from 300 people, right? Yeah.

Whereas 300 quantum bits can store the information from basically the entire universe. Now, let's be careful not to oversell it. It takes 2 to the 300 numbers to specify the state of 300 qubits. That's right. But that doesn't mean that a 300, cubit computer can usefully store

2 to the 300 pieces of information because as we will talk about later, qubits have a very rich internal state but the information is not as accessible as it is with classical bits. Wow. Okay. Like with the electron that has lots of different probabilities

you only measure it in one of them. So if all the particles in the universe got together to vote on something you'd still need a pretty big computer. Who wants to exist? Raise your quantum hands. Jorge should have another banana. Yes or no?

That's just the state of the system, right? Then there's the operation. And there's another sort of magical thing that happens. Oh, I shouldn't say magic because none of it's magical. It seems like magic because it's so weird, but it's actually physics, right? And that's what happens when you do an operation. In a normal computer, your operations are like math. I'm going to add one and one and see what happens.

Oh, I get two. What happens when you do a quantum calculation? remember that the states can be in a superposition of different states, right? It's like 40% in state zero and 60% in state one. Like it can be 30% white and 70% black. That's like one cubit, right? Right. And it's not that it has the shade of gray, which is 30% white and 70% black.

It has a probability to be white and a probability to be black. If you look at it, you can only see white or black. You'll never see gray. Oh, I see. But 70% of the time you'll see it as black and 30% you'll see. see it as white. Exactly. Oh, I see.

So it's not gray. It's just as a probability of being black or white. That's right. When you do an operation, you don't, it doesn't collapse to black or white and then do the operation. It does the operation on the probabilities themselves. Okay, so it has, you have the 30% of zero and 30% of one or 30% of white and 70% of black or whatever.

And you do the operation. It does the operation on the zero and it does the operation on the one at the same time. So it keeps both probabilities and it evolves them forward in time using quantum mechanics. So it's like doing two operations at once. Is it kind of like, as we were saying earlier, a quantum bid is kind of like an unthrown dice, right? So it's like what happens if I multiply this dye that I haven't thrown times this dye that I also haven't thrown? What's the result? Exactly. And it needs to consider, well, you know, it might be two. And so what would happen if it were two? Okay. And what would happen if it was four? And what would happen if it were six?

And it propagates all those forward simultaneously because the quantum state reflects all those probabilities. And a quantum operation moves all those operations, all those probabilities forward in time. And in effect, doing all those in parallel. So you have a massive amount of information density, plus you have massive parallelism to do these calculations. It keeps all of those possibilities inside of this new combination of information. That's right. It has all the possibilities stored into this little imaginary multiplication. That's right.

And then the new state is some different arrangement of those possibilities, right? But it reflects all the probabilities in the previous state. Now, here's an important place that a lot of people misunderstand quantum computers. A lot of people say, oh, quantum computers are super powerful because they're basically infinitely parallel. You can do like a million calculations in parallel because of quantum mechanics. meaning it keeps all these probabilities sort of in its head. Yeah, and it sort of seems like magic.

Like, you know, oh, I can try, I can break passwords because I can try millions of things all at the same time. Well, that's not exactly true. I mean, there's some truth to it because there is parallelism in the quantum world, because you're keeping all these probabilities intact and you're operating on them, you're moving them all forward simultaneously. The problem is when you get the answer, okay, you want to say, okay, I have my quantum state, I did my calculation, now I want the answer, right? How do you measure that?

When you measure it, you're going to get your black or your white. You're going to get your zero or your one. You don't get all the information. You don't get all the probabilities. You just get one answer. You roll the dice, you get your four or you get your six. And you look at it, you just get a number. You just get a number, yeah.

And so a lot of that information is lost, right? Huge amounts of that information is lost when you want to get the output from the quantum computer. And so that's why it's not really fair to say that. that it's this huge, massive parallelism. There is some parallelism there, and you can't exploit it to do certain kinds of calculations. But in the end, most of the information is thrown away when you get the answer.

Oh, I see. It's a much harder problem than you think, kind of. Yeah, exactly. And so we've built this new thing. It's a bunch of states that can be black or white, and they're all entangled and whatever. And then you can ask, can I use this to do anything? Can I represent some calculation I have in a way that this physical thing I've built,

this entangled combination of quantum states can effectively solve my problem, right? The way a classical computer can by representing in terms of math and zeros and ones. Or a baseball can solve that one single problem, right? Can a quantum computer solve useful problems? That's the next question. I see. Well, let's get into that, but let's take a quick break. A foot washed up a shoe with a foot.

Some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot was salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen.

I was just like, ah, gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, it's Honey German. And my podcast,

Grasas Come Again, is back. This season, we're going even deeper into the world of music and entertainment with raw and honest conversations with some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't audition in, like, over 25 years.

Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there. Oh, yeah. We've got some of the biggest actors, musicians, content creators, and culture shifters sharing their real stories of failure and success. You were destined to be a start. We talk all about what's viral and trending

with a little bit of chisement, a lot of laughs, and those amazing vibras you've come to expect. And of course, we'll explore deeper topics dealing with identity, struggles, and all the issues affecting our Latin community. You feel like you get a little whitewash because you have to do the code switching? I won't say whitewash because at the end of the day, you know, I'm me.

But the whole pretending and code, you know, it takes a toll on you. Listen to the new season of Grasasas Come Again as part of My Cultura Podcast Network on the IHartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Dr. Joy Hardin Bradford. And in session 421 of Therapy for Black Girls, I sit down with Dr. Othia and Billy Shaka to explore how our hair connects to our identity, mental health, and the ways we heal. Because I think hair is a complex language system, right? In terms of it can tell how old you are, your marital status, where you're from,

you're a spiritual belief. But I think with social media, there's like a hyper fixation and observation of our hair, right? That this is sometimes the first thing someone sees when we make a post or a reel.

It's how our hair is styled. You talk about the important role hairstylists play in our community, the pressure to always look put together, and how breaking up with perfection can actually free us. Plus, if you're someone who gets anxious about flying, don't miss session 418 with Dr. Angela Neil Barnett.

where we dive into managing flight anxiety. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Okay, so let's say that I build a quantum computer. And you're saying it's not going to be great for playing Mario Kart unless you're playing Quantum Mario Kart. Quantum Mario Kart is awesome. Yeah, because you're both like a dead and alive.

at the same time. Right. But it wouldn't be useful for like, you know, plain flabbybert on your phone or surfing Facebook. So what would it be good over? Why are people excited about making quantum computers? Yeah, well, it took a while for people to figure this out. People thought about the idea of quantum computers a few decades ago, like, okay, the world is built in a quantum way.

Maybe our computers should be quantum. And then it took a few decades for people to come up with ideas for how to actually use them. Like, let me take a problem I have, map it into something. that can be represented with a quantum state so that when I do this experiment on it, do these operations on it, the output of that experiment

is basically answer to my question, right? Remember, that's sort of what we're thinking of as a computer. Right, because you can't just pretend to be making a quantum computer. You actually have to build it out of quantum things, things that are quantum, right? You know what I mean?

I can't just add all these probabilities on my regular computer. Like, the computer itself has to be made out of quantum things. Right. you know, everything in the universe is made out of quantum things, right? So in that sense, you are a quantum computer, Jorge. That's right, yeah. I am scottacular.

And so one of the first things that people figured out was that there is an algorithm you can write down for factorizing big integers that says take an integer and break it all into its factors, you know, like 15 is five times three. That's obvious. But what if you had a really big number? It's hard to necessarily know how to break down, you know, one, two, three, four, seven, eight, ten into all of its factors. It's a hard, hard thing. It takes a while to do. You mean like 30 can be five times six or it can be three times ten, right?

Yeah, well, you want to break it down to all of its fundamental factors. And so 30 is two times three times five, right? This is one unique set of factors for every integer. And that's not easy to do, right? For big numbers, it could take a while because you basically just have to check them. And there's some slightly more clever algorithms using normal computers. But normal computers, it takes a long time for them to do this because they have to cycle through all the different possibilities. You mean like if I told you like 17,3004,799, tell me all the numbers

that can multiply into that number. Exactly. That would be a hard problem. It would be a hard problem for me and a slow problem for a classical computer. But there was a guy who figured out how to write an algorithm to use these quantum states, how to represent that problem on a quantum computer, right, so that you can

manipulate that computer and out out-get the answer. And the way he did it, the algorithm that he came up with is much, much faster on a quantum computer than on a normal computer. Because in a sense, it's using the parallelism. It's like, let me represent this number, how to build this number in lots of different ways, and then push all those forward simultaneously.

Right. And so he came up with an algorithm to do this, and this is a big deal because the fact that this is really hard for normal computers is the basis of a lot of modern cryptography. Meaning like how passwords are encoded. They use this idea of factoring large numbers. That's right. If you can instantly factorize a large number,

then you can break a lot of modern cryptography. You can get into the Department of Defense and the IRS and all that stuff. Because all of those things, their cryptography, their protection, their cyber protection assumes that it would take a long time to factorize a large number. Cryptography is based on the idea. that let's find problems that are hard to solve, but easy to check, right? Like, if you give me a big number and you ask me to find the factors,

it might be taking me a long time to find them. But once I had them, I could verify very quickly that they were correct. Just multiply them together, do I get the right answer? Like, it's hard to get two times three times five from 30, but it's easy to verify that two times three times five is equal to 30. Yeah, exactly. And so if you can find a faster way to do these things, then you break this assumption that's in most modern cryptography.

all, but most modern cryptography is based on the idea that these things are hard to find but easy to check. So quantum computers, in theory, can do this much, much faster because of the way they're constructed. So, again, they're better at some problems, like specialized problems. Not necessarily better at everything, though.

Right. Not that I would ever have any need to break into the IRS or anything like that. Right? Not... That's right. Let's make that clear in case there's any auditors listening here. But... So how far away are we from getting there? Like, what's the current state of the art in terms of making quantum computers?

We have quantum computers. People have built qubits, individual ones, and they've built sets of qubits together. You know, they're up to probably by the time this podcast comes out, the numbers will be irrelevant. But, you know, there are 10 cubic computers out there, 15 cubic computers. There are even ones you can access online. and IBM has one that's connected to the web. Meaning you can talk to this quantum computer they have. You can ask it questions.

Yeah, but it's hard because you have to get these qubits built and then you have to get them to be stable. And sometimes these things fall apart. I mean, the basic principle of a quantum computer works if it's in isolation. But no computer is really in isolation. It interacts with the environment, and so it gets messed up. And so these things are really finicky. They're not easy to build.

And so we're still getting good at building the bits. Like if you look at it, it'll collapse into black or white. So you have to really protect it from anyone looking at your quantum computer until you actually want the answer. Exactly, yeah. So technically these things are really tricky. But, you know, technical problems get solved. And when there's a lot of money at stake, a lot of people work on them. And so I think quantum computers are going to come pretty rapidly and get larger and larger and more complicated.

And so, you know, we're at the point where we have 10, 15 cubic computers. They don't last for very long, so you can't do long, complicated calculations on them. And they're huge, right? Like, they take up the space of a room. The way classical computers used to. You know, you look at a picture of a classical computer from 1960. It could, like, do less than your iPhone, and it filled up a whole room, right? Whoa.

You might one day have a quantum computer in your phone. No, but, like, maybe, right, in 50 years? Yeah, perhaps if you needed to do that kind of stuff. Yeah. You know, if I poo-poo the applications of quantum computers, then I risk going down in history as one of those guys who said, computers have a very specialized use. You might sell five or six worldwide. Nobody can ever predict how these things are going to change society

and how people will think to use them. Nobody wants to be that guy. No one wants to be that guy, right? But yeah, I think the future holds a big promise for quantum computers, and I think they'll crack open new kinds of problems that were hard before. So far, it's sort of a limited set of problems that quantum computers can solve. It's like, it's this a new toy, and we're trying to figure out exactly how to use it. It's definitely a new fun kind of thing.

Physicists are having fun putting together, but it's not like it can speed up every problem. Some people think, oh, quantum computers make everything faster. That's not the case. So it's not going to be like a quantum lead. It'll be more like a quantum skip, are you saying? It'll be more like a quantum massage. Whatever that means. Oh, my gosh.

Well, I hope you guys enjoyed this deep dive into quantum computers. Yeah, and if you have questions about what we said and you didn't understand it, please send us feedback to feedback at Daniel and Jorge.com. And if you have another question, you think we would take a apart nicely. You'd like to hear us talk about. Send that to us as well. Or if you just want Daniel to give you a massage, just write us at quantum massage at danielohorhe.com. That's right. I'll give you one bit of massage. One quantum bit. All right, thanks everyone for listening and tune in next time. See you next time.

nations, please drop us a line we'd love to hear from you. You can find us at Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram at Daniel and Jorge, that's one word, or email us at Feedback at Danielandhorpe.com. Hi, it's HoneyGerman, and I'm back with season two of my podcast.

Grazias, come again. We got you when it comes to the latest in music and entertainment with interviews some of your favorite Latin artists and celebrities. You didn't have to audition? No, I didn't audition. I haven't auditioned in like over 25 years. Oh, wow. That's a real G-talk right there.

Oh, yeah. We'll talk about all that's viral and trending, with a little bit of cheesement and a whole lot of laughs. And, of course, the great vivras you've come to expect. Listen to the new season of Dashes Come Again on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Every case. That is a cold case that has DNA.

Right now, in a backlog, will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the psychology podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation about how to be a better you.

When you think about emotion regulation, you're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier. Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.