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Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by elorant on Monday April 27, 2020 @01:24AM (#22993116)
The thing I don't understand about qc is how on earth can you read values from qbits without breaking superposition.
Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by cyphar on Monday April 27, 2020 @01:58AM (#22993257)
You can't, it's a fundamental aspect of quantum mechanics (measuring any entangled system collapses it because you've forced the system into a state by measuring it).

The idea is that you structure the QC system such that the computation is done using entangled states, but when it comes to measuring the qubits (to get the result of the computation) the state is such that you'll get meaningful results. This means the quantum state at the end of the calculation would ideally be along whatever axes you're measuring, so you get the same answer 100% of the time.

Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by elorant on Monday April 27, 2020 @02:34AM (#22993429)
OK but this implies that you'll have to know beforehand what a result will look like. Which kind of beats the purpose of a general purpose computational device.
Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by cyphar on Monday April 27, 2020 @03:00AM (#22993559)
No it doesn't. You know that the result of the computation for an individual qubit will be either 0 or 1 (otherwise it would be useless -- measuring only gives you one bit of information), so you construct the system such that after the computation is done each qubit will be aligned with the |+z> or whatever axis. The key point is that you have to be clever about how you construct the system for a given QC algorithm, not that you cannot do arbitrary computations using the system.
Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by elorant on Monday April 27, 2020 @03:10AM (#22993602)
OK but we're back on square one. If you can't read info from qbits without breaking the state of the whole freaking system then what exactly is that you reading? Doesn't the alignment info collapses superposition?
Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by taejo on Monday April 27, 2020 @03:34AM (#22993734)
You do "break the state of the whole freaking system". Once you've read the output, you're done. You have to set up your initial state again and run the computation from scratch.
Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by sasaf5 on Monday April 27, 2020 @05:31AM (#22994307)
You design the algorithm so that it collapses the state into the right result.
Re:Ask HN: What scientific phenomenon do you wish someone wo... by rocqua on Monday April 27, 2020 @02:41AM (#22993471)
You read the 'probability the qbit is one' by running multiple times and doing statistics.

I found an explanation of schor's algorithm by my colleagues quite helpful. In my experience math seems to be more useful here than computing science.