On Thursday, February 7, we, together with Ádám, took part in an interesting and quite rare presentation. It was in January when we discovered this opportunity, as one of the Turbine Academy programs. These are events organized by Turbine, in which they share information about cutting edge topics in an understandable, open (and free) manner.
We had to travel to Budapest, because the presentation took place in Millenáris Startup Campus, which we discovered to be an amazing building.
After exploring this cool modern place, we sat in the presentation room, and waited for the remaining part of the audience. Some minutes after the planned start, the room was already full of people, with not only the seats but also stairs filled. The presentation was given by the CTO of Turbine, Kristóf Szalay and attracted a variety of people.
In my opinion they have successfully hit the balance between scientific and casual style, therefore the diverse audience could understand the topic, even though the difficulties of the whole new technology advancements and discoveries. I’m not sure if I’ll succeed in regarding this, but at least I’ll try to write about some details.
Starting with the basics of quantum mechanics, some words were mentioned about the currently taught atom models, which -altough represent some aspects well- don’t correctly visualize electron orbitals. About some other key topics in short:
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Fourier transform and its relation to the uncertainty principle
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Measurement done on particles in quantum state, the “problems” it causes and the reasons of it
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The ψ function which shows the probability of an electron’s or photon’s current location
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The way of creating 2 entangled photons which is possible by colliding an electron and a positron (annihilation)
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Grover’s (quantum) algorithm which allows us to search for a given value in a database, using only a fraction of time and resources compared to classical computers
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And so much more… the full presentation is available here on Turbine’s facebook page.
Firstly, I was really happy about the opportunity and this little adventure we made, and on the other hand, this event calmed me down a bit. That’s because last March I also made a presentation for Physics -and although now I was able to understand some details and relations more accurately- the principles of quantum computing haven’t changed since, and the technical reality is still about creating sequences of (quantum) logical gates.
I’m excitedly looking forward to the new advancements and at the same time I’d recommend everyone to keep up with the topic, because I’m sure this is going to be a technology that will definitely change the way we are living our lives. But until then, just keep your “classical” computers at room temperature…