Moore & Rose

How many of you are familiar with Moore's Law?  Probably most if you have any geek about you :-)

For those who don't know, Moore's Law (circa 1965) is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years.   That just happens to align strongly with processing speed and memory capacity. 
So we can thank Moore's law for predicting the fancy computers we own today.
Actually - the law was originally thought to likely run its course within around 10 years.  Quite impressively, it remains true today as well!

So who is Rose?  And what is Rose's Law?  That would be Geordie Rose, who observed a very similar trend for Qubits. 
What - you ask - are qubits?  It is a made up word, a word made from the joining of "Quantum" and "bit".   Bits in the traditional digital world are binary representations, a 0 or a 1, True or False, On of Off.  Take your pick.  The key is they can take on one of two distinct values.  Nearly every modern computer works in this digital world, and quite successfully too.  Qubits can have many discrete states at the same time.  It can be a 0 and a 1 at the same time!  Part of the magic of the quantum world's weirdness.

So back to bits and qubits.  Moore used the following meager set of 5 data points to discover his law.


Rose has used the following to derive his Law:

Both represent an exponential growth in linear terms.  The difference... and this is key - it that a doubling in transistor density represents a doubling in processing power.   A doubling of Qubits represents an EXPONENTIAL growth. 
Without going very far out in the future - this could mean that in 1 or 2 years, a quantum computer will be faster than the fastest computer we have today. 
Give it another 1 or 2 years, and ONE quantum computer will be faster than all the computers on earth combined. 
Give it another 1 or 2 years, and it could conceivably be faster than the entire universe! 
Mind you, I don't even know what that last one really means.  But if it does not sound a bit scary to you, you have not watched enough science fiction!
How can it do this?  Quoting from David Deutsch, "it harnesses the refractive echoes of many trillions of parallel universes to perform a computation". 

I for one, will welcome our Robot overlords :-)


PS - neither Moore nor Rose named their laws... neither owned an ego that large.