| Sumario: | Quantum computers, which rely on the arcana of quantum mechanics to do many computations in parallel, are a long way from actually being useful. But researchers are already trying to work out how to write programs for these almost non-existent devices, in the belief that learning how to do so might help engineers to design the computers in useful ways. A paper by Stefano Bettelli of Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, and his colleagues, which has just been accepted by the European Physical Journal, describes the latest effort to come up with a quantum programming language. In a quantum computer, bits are replaced by" qubits" which are in a" superposition" of states--partially 0 and partially 1. It is this superposition that allows calculations to be performed in parallel. The key elements of their language are things called quantum registers and quantum operators. The quantum registers are ways for a program to interact with specific qubits. They act as "pointers" to the locations of qubits within a machine. Those qubits can then be manipulated by the program. Although programming languages may change a great deal before usable quantum computers can be built, it is worth constructing the theoretical underpinnings now.
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