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By: Matt Leifer
A couple of comments. First of all, Kaku says that the IBM computation was “3 times 5″, i.e. the question was 3 x 5 and the answer was 15. In fact, the computation was “factorize 15″, i.e. the question was what are the factors of 15? and the answer was 3 and 5. Although this computation is still not very impressive, there is a big difference because multiplication is easy to do on an ordinary classical computer, but factorization is believed to be hard. Secondly, he talks about the “power of silicon”, by which I guess he simply means the kind of technology that powers current computers. However, it is not clear to me that you couldn’t build a quantum computer out of silicon by exploiting it in a different way, so it would be more accurate to say “power of the current way of using silicon” or better still the “power of classical computers”, since it really doesn’t matter what the computer is made out of.www.kirstensanford.com


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