This is often and accurately called the Information Age. Nations and enterprises succeed or fail because of the use, disuse or misuse of information. Indeed, the growth in the importance of information has been outstripped only by the sheer volume of information at our disposal.

A recent University of Southern California study, for example, revealed that the typical American now consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information every single day outside of the work environment.

Occupational information is even greater.

To contrast, a mere century ago, a typical corporation generally created no more than a few dozen megabytes of data, these being stored in dead tree format. In modern times, these data pools have grown into many terabytes and have become accessible to individuals within an organization almost instantly and without regard to physical location.

All these data have not come without their drawbacks, however…

Uninterpreted data are of little worth. They must be processed into meaningful information that can be utilized in decision-making. But how can a human being sift through the mountains of seemingly unrelated data available? It is a task apparently beyond normal human ability. An urgent need has arisen for technology that can change the vast amounts of data into useful information.

By far, the largest store of data is publicly hosted on the Internet. Search giant Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) has built a vast financial empire extracting desired information from that data. However, conventional computing based on the von Neumann architecture, the basis of all modern computers, has definite limitations. So the world’s Googles are casting about looking for more powerful ways to extract useful information.

One solution exists in quantum computing.

As you know, quantum computing harnesses the basic properties of quantum particles to manipulate data. Quantum computers can theoretically solve large complex problems much faster than classical von Neumann architecture computers. They also possess the theoretical capacity to apply extremely advanced artificial intelligence techniques to harvest and classify data.

For example, a new computer algorithm, published in Physical Review Letters, demonstrates a potential for a revolutionary explosion in the ability to solve problems with millions or even trillions of variables. A quantum computer running this algorithm would be able to solve problems in a few hundred steps that would take a classical computer a hundred trillion steps to complete.

Like all new and revolutionary technologies, however, quantum computing has been met with a chorus of skepticism. This may finally be changing.

Recently, Google executives announced they have spent the past three years investigating the elusive properties of quantum computers to more efficiently perform search operations. To do so, they partnered with Canadian early-stage quantum computing company D-Wave Systems.

[Ed. Note: While D-Wave is privately held, Patrick’s Breakthrough Technology Alert readers have already been filled in on a backdoor way to pick up shares…]

To date, D-Wave has the only commercially available quantum-based computing platform. Google’s involvement, of course, serves as a major validation for D-Wave’s technology.

Among other things, Google has been utilizing D-Wave’s quantum computers to perform advanced pattern recognition. For example, at a recent Neural Information Processing Systems conference, Google was able to demonstrate a detector that can identify cars far better than any conventional system.

The detector was powered by D-Wave’s C4 Chimera quantum chip. The potential for this sort of advanced image-processing technology is staggering.

Google has recently deployed an Android mobile platform-based application called Goggles. This application allows the end-user to simply take a photo with their Android-based mobile device. Google pattern recognition then can often identify it and pull up information from the Google search engine.

Walk into an art museum, take a snapshot of a masterpiece, and there is a good chance that the Goggles application will be able to pull up relevant information regarding the work and the artist. Let me add that this application is being enabled using only traditional technology at this time. Quantum-based pattern recognition should make these kinds of information searches far more powerful.

And you can bet that they’ll be just as powerful for the fortunes of the early stage investors in these companies.

For transformational profits,
Patrick Cox

January 5, 2010

How the Launch of Practical Quantum Computing Could Change the World was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.

If you missed the chance to buy into the computer industry when it was young, this is a second shot…

Currently, the mainstream electronics industry processes data by moving bunches of electrons about in huge batches. Think of the components in your PC as electrical plumbing. Data are usually stored as batches of electrons. Imagine your computer’s hard drive as a bunch of very small buckets, some full of water, some not. This will change.

Improved materials technologies from emerging nanosciences are allowing us to replace batches of electrons with the smallest individual unit: the electron. As a result, computers will work at far higher speeds. Additionally, far less electricity will be required to do the same amount of work.

Much of this exciting news is being ignored by the market. It’s an unfortunate truth that investors often lose sight of long-term opportunities to create wealth because they get distracted by the short-term noise and news in the markets. When it comes to big transformational technologies, don’t worry about timing. The returns that disruptive technologies yield justify getting in early.

Quantum Superposition

One important quantum effect that will be used in future generations of computer technology is “quantum superposition.” In a nutshell, this means that a quantum particle can exist in multiple states and everything in between at the same time. This is because a quantum particle, such as an electron, behaves as both a particle and a wave.

Have you heard of the particle wave theory? In practical terms, it means that bizarre and counterintuitive effects occur on very small scales, and they can be harnessed.

This “quantum superposition” effect will, for example, utterly transform how we do “computer math.” Currently, nearly everything done by computers is done in binary. The smallest piece of information a computer handles, the bit, is either one or zero. A quantum computer, though, would be able to store and work with number systems other than binary.

This means computers would become exponentially more powerful because each “quantum bit” (qubit) could store a much greater range of numbers than the two that binary math restricts us to. Imagine a laptop with the computing power of the world’s 10 most powerful supercomputers. Then you begin to grasp the potential of quantum computing.

Decoding Quantum Encryption

Quantum computing also offers the means of making our communications and business transactions far more secure than they are today. Quantum cryptography exploits several remarkable effects of “quantum entanglement.” One is the ability to generate pairs of utterly unique and unbreakable keys. Basically, two random but identical particle keys can be created using entanglement. Since reading a quantum particle alters it, any effort to eavesdrop on communication is detected and that communication is either disrupted or ended.

Using this technology, we can create completely secure communications networks. Recently, Toshiba’s R&D labs announced the successful testing of quantum cryptography over fiber-optic networks. Austrians were able to send entangled photons between two Spanish islands nearly 90 miles apart.

Spintronics

One of the likeliest quantum technologies to go mainstream is the field of spintronics. This is the exploitation of different electron states. The only property of the electron that we use in electronics now is charge. Electrons, however, have another property called “spin.” Because we can change and read this spin, it can be used to compute. Already, the tech giants are investing in this technology. And there’s a reason.

I’ve written a lot about HP’s work on memristor technology. Memristors are going to provide the next great leap in computer technology. HP has been making rapid and well publicized advances. It could, in fact, have product on the market next year. This initially concerned me because HP is too big to get us anything close to a memristor pure play.

Fortunately, memristors can be built using techniques other than HP’s. My associate Ray Blanco has been poring through patents and tech journals. What he’s found is enormously exciting.

Basically, a number of other groups have made similar memristor advances using different technologies. One is based on spintronics. Seagate Technology scientists believe, in fact, that spintronic-based memristors would be more efficient and customizable than the ion-based tech debuted by HP’s labs. There are other players here, and we’ll tell you about them in the future.

The big question now, however, is not which of these technologies will emerge as the best solution. The question we’re looking at today is who will build these new components. Who, in effect, will be the Intel of the future?

For transformational profits,
Patrick Cox

June 1, 2009

The Quantum Leap of Quantum Computing was originally featured in the Penny Sleuth.