{"id":143095,"date":"2022-07-29T10:03:43","date_gmt":"2022-07-29T15:03:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/inca-knots-inspire-quantum-computer"},"modified":"2022-07-29T10:03:43","modified_gmt":"2022-07-29T15:03:43","slug":"inca-knots-inspire-quantum-computer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/07\/inca-knots-inspire-quantum-computer","title":{"rendered":"Inca Knots Inspire Quantum Computer"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/inca-knots-inspire-quantum-computer2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>We think of data storage as a modern problem, but even ancient civilizations kept records. While much of the world used stone tablets or other media that didn\u2019t survive the centuries, the Incas used something called quipu which encoded numeric data in strings using knots. Now the ancient system of recording numbers has inspired a new way <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/new-phase-of-matter-opens-portal-to-extra-time-dimension\/\" target=\"_blank\">to encode qubits in a quantum computer<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>With quipu, knots in a string represent a number. By analogy, a conventional qubit would be as if you used a string to form a 0 or 1 shape on a tabletop. A breeze or other \u201cnoise\u201d would easily disturb your equation. But knots stay tied even if you pick the strings up and move them around. The new qubits are the same, encoding data in the topology of the material.<\/p>\n<p>In practice, Quantinuum\u2019s H1 processor uses 10 ytterbium ions trapped by lasers pulsing in a Fibonacci sequence. If you consider a conventional qubit to be a one-dimensional affair \u2014 the qubit\u2019s state \u2014 this new system acts like a two-dimensional system, where the second dimension is time. This is easier to construct than conventional 2D quantum structures but offers at least some of the same inherent error resilience.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>We think of data storage as a modern problem, but even ancient civilizations kept records. While much of the world used stone tablets or other media that didn\u2019t survive the centuries, the Incas used something called quipu which encoded numeric data in strings using knots. Now the ancient system of recording numbers has inspired a [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":599,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,41,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-143095","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-information-science","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143095","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/599"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=143095"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/143095\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=143095"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=143095"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=143095"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}