Solving A Simple Simultaneous Equation Using Quantum Computer

This work appears in this week's PRL. A group of scientists have managed to solve a rather simple simultaneous equation with two variables using a quantum computation scheme proposed back in 2009.

The computational feat has been carried out by Jian-Wei Pan and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China, the University of Toronto and the National University of Singapore, who used a quantum algorithm created in 2009 by Aram Harrow, Avinatan Hassidim and Seth Lloyd. For simple systems of linear equations, Harrow and colleagues showed that their algorithm can be exponentially faster than the best solving methods that use a classical computer. One important caveat, however, is that the algorithm does not find an exact solution, but only the most likely answer.

Most likely answer, eh? Not sure how good that will be especially when we use computers to solve already-uncertain situations such as weather forecasting and other phenomena.

Still, this is merely a baby step in the evolution of quantum computers.

Zz.