Re:Einstein's missed opportunity to rid us of 'spooky action...
by a1369209993 on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @10:24PM
(#24772516)
> In typical electronic computers,
That should have had a "for example" in front.
Re:Einstein's missed opportunity to rid us of 'spooky action...
by aeternum on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @10:31PM
(#24772544)
Calling it a copy seems to me to violate QM's no cloning theorem, but maybe it's just that we have slightly different definitions of 'copy'.
Re:Einstein's missed opportunity to rid us of 'spooky action...
by a1369209993 on Tuesday October 13, 2020 @11:54PM
(#24772959)
The no cloning theorem is just the rigorous quantum mechanical version of the fact that if you flip a coin and write down the result, then copy what you just wrote down, you don't get two independent coin flips.
That's what the word "copy" means. If you flip a coin and copy that bit, you will observe that those copies do not behave independently either. If you want independent bits, flip two coins.
Similarly, "erasing" a (qu)bit technically consists of performing a exchange operation between it and a known-zero bit. In typical electronic computers, this would generally involve diffusion-like exchanges between the voltage level in a memory capacitor (such as a FET gate) and that on the GND rail, which has a much greater effective number of bits and therefore will stay mostly zero, but eventually requires a thermodynamic expenditure of known-valued bits (aka negentropy) from some external source to maintain its voltage level / bit zeroness. (This is rather simplified; there's lots of other sources of known-zero and known-one bits getting depleted and replenished, and the exact accounting depends on how you interpret various physical states information-theoretically.)