Many Time Faster Than The World Best "Quantum Computing." It's one of those things that bring a sparkle to the eyes of propellerheads — and make the rest of us just scratch our heads. But it's been a holy grail in the arcane world of supercomputers — and a Canadian firm claims it will be unveiling one on Tuesday. Nevermind that most engineers thought quantum computers were decades away. D-Wave Systems, Inc., based near Vancouver, is the company that's been working on the project. Its machine is described as a computer that can perform 64,000 calculations at once. Following the odd laws of quantum mechanics, the digital "bits" that race through its circuits will be able to stand for 0 or 1 at the same time, allowing the machine, eventually, to do work that is orders of magnitude more complex than what today's computers can do.
