Dancing the quantum dream.

The twists and turns of weaving are promising a new breed of high-performance computer that will be able to solve problems so complex they would take today's fastest processors longer than the age of the universe. This article talks about weaving in the quantum world, the realm of subatomic particles. The idea of using the quantum world to perform calculations began with the late physicist Richard Feynman. He wanted to simulate the complexities of the universe in a computer and, realising that no conventional computer was up to the job, dreamed up the "quantum computer". A classical computer would take hundreds of millions of years to factorise a number just 300 digits long, and so encryption techniques such as the popular" RSA" method have used the hidden factors of these numbers as a basis for establishing secure codes. INSET: WHERE DO ALL THE ANYONS COME FROM?.