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Volume 8, Issue 1
2001
Flip Phillips, editor of The Mathematica Journal
Quantum Computation
In late 1995 I was browsing an issue of Science, purloined
from an unsuspecting colleague, containing an article
by David DiVincenzo of IBM Watson Research on the then nascent subject of
quantum computation. Being a vision scientist my knowledge of quantum physics
could be summed up in only a very few "easy pieces," but I was
able to follow the gist of the argument enough to want to know more about it. It
is a really powerful idea–being able to use quantum information to do
computation. Since the practical issues in constructing a physical realization
of a quantum computer apparently required a few more years of incubation, I
figured I'd carefully clean my fingerprints off of the journal, return it to its
rightful owner and wait for a) someone to figure out how to build one, b)
someone to port UNIX, Emacs, and 
to it, and finally c) someone to port it to
Mathematica. But as with all good things that I am not able or permitted to
do–such
as fly an F-16 or drive a school bus on the streets and sidewalks of San
Francisco, a simulator can work wonders to cure an unscratched itch.
Additional Material
Flip Phillips
Skidmore College
Editor, The Mathematica Journal
flip@mathematica-journal.com
www.skidmore.edu/~flip
Contents copyright 2001
© The Mathematica Journal