Oh those Illini

After kicking off the whole WWW thing by writing Mosaic, the first GUI style web browser, and performing some other ancient but still amazing feats (including devising the pre-web Gopher protocol, too bad that one's not still around), those wacky geeks at the University of Illinois are onto something new - a computer that solves problems without working.

"By placing our photon in a quantum superposition of running and not running the search algorithm, we obtained information about the answer even when the photon did not run the search algorithm," said graduate student Onur Hosten, lead author of the Nature paper.

OK, right. That's what I meant. Didn't work. I like the not working part.

Obscure at this may sound [sic]...

Indeed. Like I was saying. If you understand about Schrodinger's Cat this will all make sense. And I'm happy for you, I really am.

The Reg has a link to the university's press release. Go read it.

I'm still thinking about the not working part. That's the part I like best, myself.

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