Simple Genius

Champ slid his finger along it. “In the computer field, it’s said that size matters. At the Los Alamos National Laboratory there is a supercomputer called Blue Mountain. As you undoubtedly know, every PC in the world has a chip. It’s the brain of the computer and has millions of miniature switches chirping language in 1s and 0s. Blue Mountain has over six thousand chips making it a three teraops computer; that means it can perform three trillion operations per second. They use it to simulate the effects of a nuclear blast since the U.S., thankfully, doesn’t explode the damn things for real anymore. However, as powerful as a three teraops machine is, when they tried to reproduce a mere one millionth of a second of a nuclear blast, it took old Blue four months of crunching numbers.”

“Not exactly blazing speed,” Sean commented.

“They’re working on another supercomputer that will render Blue obsolete, a thirty teraops machine code-named Q spread out over an acre of ground. It will be able to perform more calculations in a minute than a human with a calculator could in a billion years and there are plans to build even faster ones. Yet all these computers are no better than the Turing machine; they just take up far more space and cost far more to run. That was the best we could do.” He held up the tube. “Until now.”

“And you’re saying that’s a computer?”

“In its current state it’s a rudimentary device that can do a few calculations, yet that’s quite beside the point. A computer talks in languages of 1s and 0s. Now with a classic computer you’re either a 1 or a

0. You’re not both. In the quantum world those limiting rules do not apply. An atom, in fact, can be both a 1 and a 0 at the same time, and therein lies the beauty of the whole concept. A classical computer plods through a problem mostly in a linear fashion until it gets to the right answer. With a quantum computer every single atom searches for the right answer in parallel. So, say if you want to know the square root of all numbers from 1 to 100,000, you place all the numbers on a line of atoms, manipulate the atoms with energy, and then collapse it very carefully because once it’s observed the whole thing tumbles down like a house of cards. And voilà, you’ll have all the correct answers at the same time, in milliseconds.”

“I’m not seeing how that’s possible.”

Champ’s face clouded. “Of course you can’t! You’re not a genius. But let’s bring it back to something you can understand. A supercomputer like the behemoth Q feeds on data in sixty-four-bit chunks. So let’s string a row of sixty-four atoms together. Remember, Q takes up an acre; sixty-four atoms are microscopic. The sixty-four-atom quantum computer can theoretically perform eighteen quintillion calculations simultaneously compared to Q’s rather meager thirty trillion per second.”

Sean gaped. “Eighteen quintillion? That’s an actual number?”

“I’ll try to give you some context. To equal the computing power of those sixty-four microscopic bits of energy, Q the supercomputer would need the surface space equal to five hundred suns to house all the required computer chips.” He smiled impishly. “If you could figure out how to deal with the heat issue, of course. Or you can just use molecules. As you can see they take up far less space. And as I said that’s why size matters in the computing world; only small rather than large is far better.”

“And Monk Turing was familiar with all of this?” Sean asked.

“Yes. He was a very gifted physicist.”

“And what he knew might have been something that could be sold?”

“There certainly might be people out there willing to pay for it.”

“Anyone ever mention to you that there might be spies at Babbage Town?”

Sean had thrown this comment out offhand to gauge the man’s reaction.

“Who told you that?”

“So you knew about possible spies here?”

“No, I mean, well, it’s always possible,” Champ said haltingly, his face very pale.

“Okay, calm down, and tell me the truth.”

The other man bristled. “I can’t say for sure whether there are or aren’t spies here. That’s the truth.”

“If there are what would they be after?”

“We have years of data, of research, of trial and error, of progress, of possibilities. We are closing in on the answer.”

“And that’s valuable?”

“Enormously valuable.”

“Worth going to war for?”

Champ stared at him. “I hope to God not, but-”

“Monk Turing apparently went out of the country about nine months ago. You must have approved the leave. Do you know where he went?”

“No, but he said it was family-related. You don’t think Monk Turing was a spy, do you?”

Sean didn’t answer. He glanced over at a worker who was leaving the hut. As she passed through the doorway, a small panel next to the door blinked. Sean hadn’t noticed it when they’d come in.

“What’s that?”

“A scanner,” Champ said. “It automatically records who leaves and when.”