We propose the use of Rydberg interactions and ensembles of cold atoms in mixed state for the implementation of a protocol for deterministic quantum computation with one quantum bit that can be readily operated in high dimensional Hilbert spaces. We propose an experimental test for the scalability of the protocol and to study the physics of discord. Furthermore, we explore the possibility of extending to non-trivial unitaries, such as those associated to many-body physics. Finally develop a scheme to add control to cold atom unitaries in order to facilitate their implementation in our proposal.At present, no single feature of the quantum world has been identified as the source of the computational enhancement, efficiency and speed-up of quantum protocols. Whilst entanglement is widely recognized as a key resource in quantum technology [1], an advantage over classical computing could be achieved without it [2] in the presence of non-classical correlations (discord). Experiments using few photonic qubits [3] have shown that some computational tasks can be efficiently solved even with no entanglement. As entanglement is