Most careers in operating system development probably start with a seemingly simple task - produce a program that, at start time, takes full control of a computer and prepares for the execution of the actual operating system, i.e. boot the computer. It turns out, however, that - thanks to the complexity of modern x86 based … Continue reading Get your kernel going – the boot process
We have now seen how quantum gates implement unitary transformations on qubits. Intuitively, we should, as in the classical case, now be able to combine these quantum gates into quantum algorithms that perform more complex sequences of manipulations of a quantum state. In this post, we will look at a first example to get an … Continue reading Quantum algorithms – a first example
What happens if you turn on a PC? How is an operating system able to run multiple tasks in parallel? What happens if you hit a key on your keyboard? And what actually is a process? If you have ever thought for more than a second about one of these things, then read on... A … Continue reading Why building an operating system from scratch?
So far, we have looked at states of a quantum computer and expressed these states in terms of qubits. However, just having a static state is of very limited use - to perform actual computations, we of course have to change our state over time. In quantum mechanics, state changes are described by unitary transformations … Continue reading Quantum gates
When you use your favorite search engine to search for information on quantum computing, the first term that will most likely jump at you is the qubit. In this post, I will try to explain what this is and how it is related to the usual framework of quantum mechanics. Please be aware that this … Continue reading Qubits and Hilbert spaces
In our discussion of the IP protocol, the reader might have noticed that there are many desirable features that the IP protocol does not have. Suppose for instance that we are building an application that needs to transmit data in a stream oriented way - this could be a video, an MP3 file or a … Continue reading Networking basics – the TCP protocol
When I started this blog, my intention was to document my own attempts to learn and understand some of the topics at the intersection of computer science, physics and mathematics that have the potential to change the world in which we work and live. After spending some time with one of these topics - machine … Continue reading Quantum computing
