This Revolutionary Computer Is About to Change The World for Good

hey 42 here the history of the computer goes back further than most people think the very first automatic mechanical computing device for example was built in 1822 by English polymath Charles Babbage admittedly the difference engine as it was known was pretty basic by today's standards it was powered by a hand crank for a start while Babbage's device was capable of automatically computing values for polynominal functions by 1837 mr. Babbage had drawn up plans for an even more advanced kind of machine the analytical engine as it happened this was to be the first ever design for a general-purpose programmable computer and when Ada Lovelace the only legitimate child of one of the greatest English poets in history and full time reg Lord Byron wrote an algorithm for this theoretical machine she became the first computer programmer in history sadly and despite mr. Babbage working on this device on and off until he died in 1871 he was never completed but the design was so groundbreaking that Babbage is known today as the father of the computer and what a proud father he would be if he were still alive today he definitely isn't by the way you can go see half of his pickled brain in the Science Museum in London since his death Babbage's metaphorical electronic offspring have changed a world beyond all recognition despite the famous prediction of one time IBM CEO Tom Watson who in 1943 estimated the total global market for computers would stretch to around five yes he meant a global demand for five individual computers there are now for us to be more than two billion of the things in homes and offices around the world if Charles Babbage truly is the father of the computer he has spread his seed far and of course the kinds of computers were familiar with today of the digital variety and these arrives on the scene in the 1930s around a hundred years after Babbage's mechanical difference engine was built in the 90s since the leaps forward that have been made in computing frankly astonishing as you may have already heard the Apollo 11 spacecraft that brought Neil Armstrong and his fellow astronauts to the moon in 1969 was about as powerful as a modern calculator fifty years later a common piece of tech that most of us used daily to stay in touch with our friends and generally piss about the smartphone is quite literally millions of times as powerful these exponential increases in computing power we've witnessed are broadly described by Moore's law named after Intel co-founder and one-time CEO Gordon Moore which states that the processing power of computers doubles roughly every two years but the biggest driver if moore's law has been our ability to shrink the physical size of key components in our computer processors particularly transistors year-on-year the smaller you can make your transistors the more you can squeeze onto your chip and the more computing power you have at your disposal measured by computer scientists as flops or floating-point operations per second the problem is the smallest transistors today are just a few atoms across pretty soon smaller just isn't going to be an option manufacturers are coming up with clever new ways to keep processor power rising but it's becoming increasingly expensive and challenging to do so which is why for the first time in 50 years or so Moore's law no longer applies exponential gains in processing power becoming a thing of the past this doesn't necessarily mean we're reaching peak computer but it does mean that we're no longer making the kinds of huge strides forward that have powered many of the technological and scientific advances humanity has achieved in recent decades now you might be sitting there thinking to yourself whether we actually need more computing power after all if we could fly to the moon on a glorified pocket calculator the most powerful computers of today should be able to do pretty much anything right so long as we have enough of them actually not so much the most powerful supercomputer in the world today is IBM's Summit it's the size of around two basketball courts and uses a hundred and thirty six miles of cables it's capable of executing and when Tilian operations per second a number that sounds like it was made up by a five-year-old to win an argument and it's being used to push back the boundaries of human understanding in fields like energy AI and healthcare all very impressive sounding but there are things even summit can't help us with at least not unless we have a spare few million years to leave it running certain mathematical problems are just extremely resilient to solving by classical computers even really big shiny ones like summit the most commonly wheeled out example is prime factorization finding two prime factors of a given number make that given number larger north and classical computers simply aren't up to the task now factoring large numbers might seem like a fairly arbitrary thing to want to do with the world's most powerful computer I mean I just like to know can it run Crysis but it just so happens that the fact it is very very hard to solve these problems with any kind of regular computer is one of the foundational principles of Internet Security but you can make sure you're already two steps ahead of the game by vastly improving your personal security with dashlane you have kindly spots today's video the best way to protect yourself against hackers spammers and other online threats is by using a leading password manager and all-in-one security suite - Slade he will store all of your passwords in a super safe way without ever having access to them or allowing anyone but you to view them - Lee creates strong and unique passwords for all of your online accounts and also fills them so you never have to click forgot password ever again and you don't have to sweat about the 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powerful classical computers is diminishing and there are still problems out there that we don't have the tools to solve with current technology do we just have to accept that we're reaching the limits of what we're capable of as a species actually no we just need to build a different kind of computer one that transcends the natural physical limits of microchips a quantum one the first thing we should clear up is that quantum computers are not simply a newer faster version of regular computers that means if all you want to do is watch YouTube and share memes you're better off hanging onto your trusty laptop even if a few of the keys are beginning to stick quantum computers work in a drastically different way to regular computers and they're good at doing different things just how a lightbulb isn't a better version of a candle it's a different way of generating light a quantum computer isn't a better version of a computer it's a completely new way of approaching computation but start with the basics the fundamental unit of information in a classical computer is the binary digit known as a bit these bits have two possible states either 0 or 1 and strings of them can be used to encode information you can think of them as a series of very simple switches it might not sound like much but at a fundamental level bits underpin pretty much every single thing you do on your computer yes even that a quantum computer on the other hand has qubits literally quantum bits instead of regular bits just like regular bit qubits have two possible basic states if a 0 or 1 but unlike regular bits qubits are for want of a better way of putting it pretty weird in our classical computers the state of event is fixed at any given time it's either 0 or 1 and sure enough qubits have a 0 and 1 state also represented by how they are aligned within their hosts magnetic field in quantum mechanics this is called spin and the 2 possible states are spin up and spin down but there is a magical third state well it's actually not a state at all it is to put it in lay language a combination of both known States you see whilst a quantum computer is operating the state of each qubit is undefined there is some probability of each qubit being a 1 and some probability of it being a 0 this one defines state is known as a quantum superposition where it can be considered to be in both spin up and spin down at the same time and only when we observe the system will a superposition collapse and the qubit will settle on one of its two basic states it's an odd concept but many of you will have come across it before in famous feline torturer her windrow ting his force experiment known as Schrodinger's cat before we open the box the cat is neither alive nor dead but is in a superposition of the two only when we open the box and observe the cat is it one or the other explaining exactly how quantum superposition makes quantum computers so powerful would take several textbooks a boatload of muffs a theoretical physics education that I don't possess and an exploration of some other weird quantum phenomena like quantum entanglement or spooky action at a distance as Einstein called it but the general concept is this a classical computer can only be in one basic state at a time that means when joins itself a problem like crime factoring where there are many potential solutions to sort through broadly speaking it must check each solution one after the other but when a qubit is in a superposition it's able to process huge numbers of classical States in parallel which allows it to do certain kinds of calculations exponentially faster than a classical computer code Erik Clara's insky co-founder of the quantum computing company d-wave explains it like this imagine that you only have five minutes to find an X written on the page of a single book amongst 50 million of a books in the Library of Congress if you search for the X like a regular computer one page at a time you would never find it before your five minutes are up but if you had 50 million parallel realities and you could look at a different book in each of those realities you would find the X much much faster in this second example a quantum computer splits you into 50 million versions of yourself to make the work quick and easy and you may think but we've had parallel computing for over 50 years one of the big to retailed micro process of manufacturers AMD sells a CPU that has 64 cores and you can slot it right into your home desktop computer with the right motherboard and the videos latest GPU can compute almost 5,000 problems in parallel why don't we just keep improving these existing technologies well because of the atomic level physical size limits of transistors that we touched on earlier we're quickly nearing the limit of how much further we can push this parallelism unless we change the rules of the game we'll never reach the aforementioned 50 million parallel processors of a quantum computer using classical computing hardware because adding more cores to a classical computer system increases its power linearly providing the software can take full advantage of each core of course conversely with quantum computers with each qubit you add to the system the amount of parallel processors you can run increases exponentially so with two qubits you can consider for potential outcomes at once but with four qubits you can consider sixteen if you were to pack just 300 cubits into a quantum computer it could consider more variables at once than there are particles in a known universe now that's what I call parallel computing now it's possible that you might be feeling a tad confused right about now if so that's awesome you're probably getting it after all richard fineman the man who originated the idea of the quantum computer in the first place once said if you think you understand quantum mechanics you don't understand quantum mechanics seeing as he went on to win the Nobel Prize for his work in quantum mechanics it's a safe bet he knew what he was talking about when he claimed he didn't know what he was talking about okay so all of this sounds great but what can we actually use quantum computers for earlier on I mentioned that quantum computers are much much better than classical computers at finding the prime factors of very large numbers which is a foundational principle in data encryption and digital security it's been estimated that a classical computer would take trillions of years to crack RSA's 2048 encryption which is commonly used to secure data transmission online a quantum computer on the other hand could do so in a matter of hours effectively rendering modern online security obsolete but before you withdraw all your money from the bank and start shoveling it under your mattress don't worry digital security has always been an arms race and in this case the good guys have a pretty big head start on the bat post quantum encryption methods are already being developed that will be able to thwart even quantum computers though admittedly implementing them will still require a radical redesign of the way encryption works online think something along the lines of fixing the Millennium book a mythical insect that if you are any younger than I am you've probably never heard of but don't worry it turned out to be rather harmless in the end beyond Internet Security there are many theoretical applications for quantum could be plans are already in place to use quantum computers to create wildly powerful AIS by supercharging the machine learning process with quantum algorithms the downside of course is that these AIS will one day rise up and destroy us but in the last few seconds before we're finally exterminated we'll all be able to take great pride in how clever we were to come up with quantum computers in the first place quantum computers are also unsurprisingly extremely good at simulating quantum physics itself this was in fact the original application Fineman had in mind when he came up with the concept since the complexities involved make this an area unsuited to classical computers classical computers are so inaccurate when it comes to physics that all existing models broadly approximates the in vastly simplify terms rules of the universe which isn't tremendously useful to scientists but with quantum computers able to model immensely complex interactions at the particle level we will be able to make huge advances in designing new trucks materials solar cells high-temperature superconductors as well as many other niche was incredibly impactful in use cases such as modeling chemical catalysts for use in making better fertilizers quantum computers will also help us perfect the optimization of complex systems like traffic flow and logistics problems on a massive scale we'll be able to accurately model national and global financial systems with currently impossible levels of granularity and complexity which could either be used to highlight financial weak points and level up society or predict what the markets will do next and make the banks even richer only time will tell but I'm betting on the last okay so quantum computers are going to be awesome we seem to know exactly what they're going to look like and how they would work so why haven't we just made one already well it turns out they're actually pretty tricky to put together qubits themselves are typically made from subatomic particles like photons or electrons firstly you have to isolate them and to get them to reliably perform the weird [ __ ] we talked about earlier you need to make them very very cold and we aren't talking oh it's a bit chilly in here maybe I'll put a jumper on cold we're talking literally colder than the nut shriveling darkest reaches of outer space cold in fact it's a balmy 2.7 Kelvin outer space looks like a tropical holiday compared to what's required to run a quantum computer just 0.01 5 Kelvin that's about minus 273 degrees Celsius to those of you who don't speak science or to put it another way almost as cold as it is physically possible to make something in our universe that's being zero Kelvin or absolute zero even at this temperature qubits are very unstable and prone to decoherence which occurs when the surrounding environment interacts with them and errors are introduced to the system all things considered attempting to make a quantum computer presents a vast engineering challenge and requires monumental amounts of cash which is why the good guys will have a huge head start in developing new quantum security protocols it could be a further decade or more before this monumentally challenging technology trickles down to your everyday basement hacker and it just so happens that there is one entity out there with some pretty nifty engineers and very deep pockets who actually have made a working quantum computer already just last year Google claimed to have achieved something called quantum supremacy with their 54 qubit quantum computer called Sycamore quantum supremacy is not as it sounds racism against regular computers what is defined as a quantum computer completing a computation that no classical computer could match in a reasonable amount of time google claims sycamore ran a random sampling calculation in 200 seconds something they say would take the most powerful classical computers available today around 10,000 years admittedly IBM did come along the very next day to piss on the quantum barbeque by claiming their supercomputer sumit could complete that task in 2.5 days but that is still significantly longer than sycamore talk about a thousand times longer in fact and all with just 54 qubits so why didn't you hear about this literal quantum leap forward for humanity that's a good question but then many of the most influential inventions in history have been underappreciated to begin with today there are tens of billions of light bulbs in use around the world but when Thomas Edison and his team invented this new and improved version of the candle that wasn't a candle leading scientist Henry Morton of the Stevens Institute of Technology predicted it would be a conspicuous failure and the British government felt it was unworthy of the attention of practical or scientific men quantum computers are still very much in their infancy but they are absolutely already here and though the full implications likely won't be understood for some time to come one thing's for sure they will most definitely change the world thank you for watching thanks for watching it thanks again - - ly don't forget to check them out using the link below

Channel: Thoughty2

Views: 2,214,801

Rating: 4.8688774 out of 5

Keywords: quantum, quantum computing, quantum computers, computers, theoretical physics, physics, quantum mechanics, quantum physics, quantum supremacy, quantum computer, science, quantum physics explained, quantum theory, quantum computing explained, what is quantum mechanics, quantum entanglement, particle physics, quantum mechanics explained, quantum physics documentary, science documentary, computer science, physics explained, science videos, quantum tunnelling, quantum documentary

Id: AZP9CU-RPpw

Length: 22min 40sec (1360 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/TheVaporSpirit]

It'll likely stick around in the corperate market for a while until we get our sequal that totally wasn't conceived as a joke of being only there being PC 1.