Can normal transistors act like a qubit?

Hi. I guess I have a question relating to quantum computing. Since qubits are what makes up quantum computers... That being a qubits can act like a transistor that can be either on, off, or both on and off at the same time. In usual computing... Transistors are either on or off. In quantum they can be both on and off at the same time...

The question I have is simply this.

Is it possible to make a transistor that can act as on, off, and on and off at the same time... Even if you had to add an extra layer of circuitry to get that same reading from that single transistor?

I mean. A normal transistor operate that if it gets no voltage or low voltage then the transistor is in an off state. If it gets a certain voltage it is in an on state. Couldn't you make the voltage extra high to get a both on/off at the same time state? Or half voltage to get the same on/off state at the same time to essentially create a fake qubit scenario? There might have to be additional transistors to help make sure of that determination of a transistor appearing in an on/off state but couldn't it be possible?

Perhaps a circuit of transistors could determine whether the proceeding transistor should act as both on/off by checking the voltage some how? Idk...

Please answer me like I'm a drunk stupid idiot. Perhaps laymen terms? I can be quite the idiot sometimes.

Thanks for hearing me out. I'm currently drunk and just pondering things

a reply to: DaRAGE

I'm sure we could do weird stuff with circuitry to store more than one bit of data in the circuit, but that doesn't really give an advantage over just storing more bits with our conventional technology (which has been highly refined). The advantage of the qbit isn't really that it stores more information, it's that it can be used to process more information at the same time.

Quantum + computing = quantum computing The key features of an ordinary computer—bits, registers, logic gates, algorithms, and so on—have analogous features in a quantum computer. Instead of bits, a quantum computer has quantum bits or qubits, which work in a particularly intriguing way. Where a bit can store either a zero or a 1, a qubit can store a zero, a one, both zero and one, or an infinite number of values in between—and be in multiple states (store multiple values) at the same time! If that sounds confusing, think back to light being a particle and a wave at the same time, Schrödinger's cat being alive and dead, or a car being a bicycle and a bus. A gentler way to think of the numbers qubits store is through the physics concept of superposition (where two waves add to make a third one that contains both of the originals). If you blow on something like a flute, the pipe fills up with a standing wave: a wave made up of a fundamental frequency (the basic note you're playing) and lots of overtones or harmonics (higher-frequency multiples of the fundamental). The wave inside the pipe contains all these waves simultaneously: they're added together to make a combined wave that includes them all. Qubits use superposition to represent multiple states (multiple numeric values) simultaneously in a similar way. Just as a quantum computer can store multiple numbers at once, so it can process them simultaneously. Instead of working in serial (doing a series of things one at a time in a sequence), it can work in parallel (doing multiple things at the same time). Only when you try to find out what state it's actually in at any given moment (by measuring it, in other words) does it "collapse" into one of its possible states—and that gives you the answer to your problem. Estimates suggest a quantum computer's ability to work in parallel would make it millions of times faster than any conventional computer... if only we could build it! So how would we do that? explainthatstuff.com

If I understand correctly, a quantum computer will just be a smaller, more energy efficient version of a massive parallel computer.

a reply to: DaRAGE

Please answer me like I'm a drunk stupid idiot. Perhaps laymen terms? I can be quite the idiot sometimes.

I been struggling with a reply to that and give up.

I thought Qbit was a game.

ooops, I guess that's Q#bert.

a standard transistor is only able to do two settings off and on and they're physical devices, just think of a transistor as a light switch in that you either have the bulb on or off and as such they're in the classical school of electronics etc.

The quantum system is well beyond my poor maths and wasn't around when i went to uni other than as a theoretical lesson or two in the late 90's as even our lecturers didn't really understand it and there wasn't much around at the time to read on it.

zapping a transistor with more power will blow it up or you could create a tri-state value so instead of just 0 or 1 you now have 0,1,2 but it gets messy with having to work out the voltage boundaries for each value and while power supplies etc are a lot better than they used to be if you have a tri-state transistor and if the power is very near the border it could lead to possible wrong values and cause errors and thats before we start to work on three level logic etc and at which point i'll be at the bar.

a reply to: VP740

"If I understand correctly, a quantum computer will just be a smaller, more energy efficient version of a massive parallel computer."

They will also be infinitely quicker in there ability to process information.

a reply to: andy06shake

What kind of information? As far as I know, researchers believe quantum Turing machines are less powerful than nondeterministic Turing machines (though that hasn't been proven), and even nondeterministic Turing machines have limitations.

Shor's algorithm shows the best advantages I know of for Quantum computing, but as powerful as it is, it doesn't demonstrate that a quantum computer would have infinite computing power.

a reply to: DaRAGE

This Russian scientist thought the exact same idea but with quantum bits. He thought, "Why not slice a qubit in four or five?" The idea being there are more energy states in a qubit than just a binary state so why not use them. It would automatically increase the number of produced qubits meaning you do not have to make as many. You just have to create a method to read the state.

ATS post in my thread: Room Temperature Quantum Entanglement in Semiconductor.

In that thread, Univ. of Chicago researchers are working towards two goals. One, create a qubit at room temperature in ordinary semiconductor (silicone carbide, SiC). Two, increase the time of coherence in SiC. One of the last posts states they have reached 1.3 milliseconds which if true and if it is the same as the room temperature announcement general quantum computing is right around the corner.

Your idea might be a great way to extend current computing and maybe use it as error detection within the bit itself. Or maybe even encryption. (Tin foil hat time) Maybe somebody already has done that and has only let us have the ordinary computers.

a reply to: andy06shake

Wikipedia's article on hyper-computing shows this:

Quantum models

Some scholars conjecture that a quantum mechanical system which somehow uses an infinite superposition of states could compute a non-computable function.[21] This is not possible using the standard qubit-model quantum computer, because it is proven that a regular quantum computer is PSPACE-reducible (a quantum computer running in polynomial time can be simulated by a classical computer running in polynomial space).

a reply to: DaRAGE

The simple answer is...no. The longer answer is ... sorry, no.

If you get down to transistors that are designed to cause this sort of behavior, then yes.

But it takes a QDL sort of qubit element to do that.

originally posted by: Maxatoria
a standard transistor is only able to do two settings off and on...

No, no, most bipolar transistors have nice somewhat linear behaviors. Even the switching ones. Hell, sometimes the switching transistors have better behavior than the supposedly linear ones.

It's pretty rare that you have a transistor with no linear behavior, until you get into something like a gate-controlled thyristor, and I'd have to debate that it's not a transistor at that point.

originally posted by: Maxatoria
a standard transistor is only able to do two settings off and on and they're physical devices.

Not exactly so, transistors are capable of producing a linear output in voltage once the base voltage to start conducting has been satisfied. You typical audio amplifier would not work very well if it simply switched on and off. It is the ability to create a large voltage gain based on a small base voltage that makes a transistor "amplify" a signal. So, the reality is that a transistor circuit can produce much more than just an on/off state. Sure, in computers people think of transistors as binary logic devices producing either a 0 (off) or a 1 (on) state but that is by design. Typically a 0 is any voltage less than ~2v where a 1 is a voltage above 4 or 4.5 in a 5 volt logic circuit so even there, you can see an area of grayness but certainly not a mixed mode on/off On & Off qubit type device.

I do not think it is possible with a transistor and if it is they wouldn't call it a transistor anymore, maybe a qturnator or something.

ETA: I see Bedlam has already weighed in.

a reply to: evc1shop

Its been 20+ years since i last had to fart around with such stuff at uni so i'm a bit rusty but i was thinking more in the computing side

originally posted by: Bedlam
a reply to: DaRAGE

The simple answer is...no. The longer answer is ... sorry, no.

If you get down to transistors that are designed to cause this sort of behavior, then yes.

But it takes a QDL sort of qubit element to do that.

This goes well out of my area of expertise, but we have built ternary computers before (the Russians particularly seem to like them). And rather than representing the states as -1, 0, 1 or 0, 1, 2, wouldn't it be possible to represent the states as 0, 0&1, 1?

I've been studying Automata lately, and I can see how such a machine could be represented with NFA's but it still has the limitation that it's 0 and/or 1. I thought the advantage to a qubit is that it represents 0, 1, and the infinite range of states between those two values.

originally posted by: Maxatoria
a reply to: evc1shop

Its been 20+ years since i last had to fart around with such stuff at uni so i'm a bit rusty but i was thinking more in the computing side

I don't think it matters much whether it was for discrete circuitry or a logic board, they operate on the same principle.

The only way I could see you getting an ON/OFF clearly defined PLUS an on/off secondary signal on the same device would actually be to use a comparator or two so you could switch a transistor fully or off and see that signal as well as having two defined low level and high level outputs via comparator to indicate the on/off on the fringes of the gray state.

Of course if your building all of this you might as well just use and analog to digital converter, store the charge (value) in a capacitive cell sort of like an SSD macrocell and sample it for the 4 states as your qubit needs. Again, this can't be done with a simple transistor. You need a slew of support components in my opinion.

But you did not do it with a single transistor, correct?

See my post above, I provided a couple of methods that may make something like that possible but still not in a singular device like a transistor.

a reply to: VP740

Well until we manage to invent a working quantum processor(and prove it functions) we wont really be able to answer as to what kind of information we will endeavor to process.

I image such a device may allow us to calculate complex mathematical equations much more efficiently not to mention the applications regarding cryptography.

Depends what you mean by infinite, a machine that could demonstrate infinite computing power could quite possibly allow humanity to broach the singularity giving us(or it) the ability to learn and/or process information at an exponential rate.

Lets just say quantum computing is a step in the right direction, as to whether or not such a device will display "infinite computing power", i don't really know, possibly infinite was a poor choice of wording, certainly more complex by rather a large order of magnitude compared to its silicone counterpart.