Quantum Supremacy: Chapter 2
January 7, 2025
Summary
Computers started from analog to digital to Turing through a series of events that questioned mathematics. Quantum computers will have to layer in physics.
Quick Notes
- The Antikythera mechanism, found in 1901 at bottom of Aegan Sea, is the world's oldest analog computer. It is believed to be a gift to Julius Caesar. One set of gears motioned the sun and the moon. Another gear could predict the next eclipse of the sun. Overall goal was to map the cosmos which quantum computers aim to do as well.
- Babbage is known as the Father of the Computer. He worked with Ada Lovelace. He pretty much recreated the Antikythera while Ada Lovelace wrote the instructions for it (world's first programmer). However, Ada died early and Babbage ran out of funds so a lot of the projects did not get completed.
- Godel challenged the question: is mathematics complete? His theorem says that in any system, you cannot prove everything to be true. There will be things that are true that cannot be proven with the axioms (a statement that is true) provided.
- Turing took this further by asking if there are problems that can be complete in a finite time with Turing machine. For example, a Turing complete language (also called a universal language) means is one where you can compute anything that any other computational method can compute. SO Turing incomplete languages have some limits in what they can compute.
- Imitation Game (Turing Test): what Turing called a scenario of putting a human in one room and a robot in another and trying to guess which is the human through infinite questions.