back to article Boffins want to put Quanta in containers, after docking

Don't laugh: a group of Japanese and Australian boffins want to use container ships to carry around entangled quanta. Entanglement is hard to maintain over any great distance – a few tens of kilometres through optical fibre, a hundred or so through the atmosphere – because of noise. Repeaters are forbidden by the “no-cloning …

  1. Mark 85

    So if I read this correctly, it's late where I am and I'm probably not grasping this correctly.... the latency will come from shipping the container to the destination? I guess it would be faster than the US Mail.

    Ok.. so just set me straight if I'm wrong. I have my idiot moments with this quantum stuff.

    1. Trigonoceps occipitalis

      No Idiot moments Here

      I'm bright enough (just) to know that I don't understand it.

  2. Anomalous Cowshed

    Making a qbit at home

    How to get a quantum memory in the first place, for all you eager amateur quantum computer buffs out there.

    Insert conventional memory chip into blender. Best use DRAM chip, but if you cannot get one, Micro SD card with Flash memory is ok.

    Blend on hyperfine setting until you obtain a fine powder

    Immerse powder in sulphuric acid for several days until all the powder has dissolved

    Dilute repeatedly to 1:1000000000, until there is no absolute certainty, but a definite possibility of the residual presence of any molecules of DRAM in any given quantifiable volume of the solution.

    Remove 10cc of the diluted solution (the Quantum Fraction)

    Pour into sturdy plastic vat.

    Wear appropriate clothing, something that reflects the reverence of the proceedings and turn any lights down using a dimmer or an on/off switch if no dimmer is available.

    Smack the vat hard with a sledgehammer while chanting lines from the officially sanctioned abridged biography of Max Planck to an appropriate Plainchant tune.

    Continue as long as possible, until the vat shows signs of impending cracking.

    Voila, your qbit is ready! All you now need to do is extract it from the plastic vat, but that's a specialist job full of uncertainties, and we couldn't definitely tell you how to do it.

    1. Andy The Hat Silver badge

      Re: Making a qbit at home

      I think the 'laying on of hands and sledgehammer' approach to qbit production is probably less feasable than you suggest. Perhaps a large price tage and asking me to insert it where the sun don't shine would make it a more realistic proposition? Would it really increase my memory capacity? Would I start calling myself Sonny? Where do I sign?

      Oh, and a back of the envelope calculation for average container bandwidth:

      Based on a perfectly reasonable package size, and allowing for some elbow room, each cubic metre of the container could store about 10^16bits using current SDram (not in retail packaging obviously!) If you got rid of all the refrigeration and replaced it with chips that would give 4x10^17bits per load using *current* technology.

      But what about the extra noise redundancy containers?

      That means we've got another 6 of these containers - so 10^18 bits ...

      Hmm 10^12 doesn't look so rosy now ... and you can read them using your tabletty thing of choice without a lab full of quantum reader ...

      I'd just hate to be the poor sod who has to plug them all in ...

    2. breakfast Silver badge
      Holmes

      Re: Making a qbit at home

      Of course the important thing about making quantum computer components is that you must not observe them in any way either during or after the process.

      1. Paul

        Re: Making a qbit at home

        you're allowed to measure their speed, or work out their position, but not both.

  3. cortland

    But

    There's a cure: fungicide.

  4. Mark 85

    Finally got it

    Thanks to my fellow commentards, I think I grasp this... there'a cat in a 1 square meter box (maybe) and that box inside of the shipping container (probably but we're not sure). But we can't look in either.

    1. dan1980

      Re: Finally got it

      @Mark 85

      Almost, but not quite.

      What happens is that you take two cats and put each in a 1m3 box and ship them to two different little children. Upon one child opening the box and finding a happy and alive kitty to play with, the other child's cat is instantaneously killed, leaving a child in need of therapy and a father in need of a shovel.

  5. Sureo

    Beam me up, Scotty. I canna do that, captain, your quanta are all entangled!

  6. Martin Budden Silver badge
    Coat

    Say for example you are on the receiving end and you take delivery of a shipping container. Until you open it, you are uncertain as to whether the shipping company has delivered the correct quantum-memory container or some other one containing a dead cat.

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