Our analysis also demonstrates the limitations of conventional computers for analyzing large phylogenies.
Techniques invented to understand quantum algorithms have repeatedly proved useful for understanding conventional algorithms — and there are now cryptographic codes, purely for conventional computers, for which the main evidence of their security comes from arguments based on quantum computing.
(Only this year have sales of L.C.D. terminals outpaced those of conventional computer terminals, according to Ms. Allen, of iSuppli/Stanford Resources).
It will be a long time before they are putting any conventional computer makers out of business.
On a conventional computer, the number of steps needed to solve the model is thought to blow up exponentially as the number of spins increases, making it among the hardest computational problems.
For instance, when a multiplication program is run through a standard conventional computer, the steps of the program are translated into the computer's machine language and executed there, but at this level the operations apply to 1's and 0's with no obvious way to map them onto the original numbers to be multiplied or to the multiplication operation.
In July, a team of physicists including John Martinis of the University of California, Santa Barbara, reported in Science that the controversial D-Wave quantum computer offers no advantage over a conventional computer as the size of computations increases.
The subject controlled card sorting by means of a conventional computer keyboard, using the fingers of the right hand on the numeric block (keys 1, 2, 3, 4 that indicated the four possible target positions on the computer screen).
One simulation took about 20 h of computation time on single core of a conventional computer (PC, Linux, Intel Xeon CPU E5-1660, 3.3 GHz).
In conventional computers, "bits" of data are stored as a string of 1s and 0s.
