Google's Quantum Computer
Nowdays,Google is testing a quantum computer—a machine based on the seemingly magical principles of quantum mechanics, the physics of things like atoms and electrons and photons. This computer, called the D-Wave, carries a $10 million price tag, and the idea is that it can perform certain tasks exponentially faster than computers built according to the laws of classical physics—the physics of the everyday world.
In the future, says Hartmut Neven, who oversees Google’s experiments with the D-Wave, it may significantly improve machine learning, the technique by which computers analyze vast troves of data to learn skills like recognizing photos, identifying spoken words, understanding natural language, and, maybe one day, mimicking common sense.
Neven—who helped write the Google research paper, released earlier this week, that details the company’s experiments—compares the D-Wave to the airplane the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The Wright Flyer barely got off the ground, but it foretold a revolution. “Their airplane took a trajectory through the air,” he says. “That’s the point”
In the same way, he says, the D-Wave has solved problems following a flight path that defies the laws of classical physics. “In fact, the trajectory went through parallel universes to get to the solution,” he says. “It is literally that. That is an amazing, somewhat historical, event. It has worked in principle. The thing flew.”
The tech company says its mammoth D-Wave 2X quantum computing machine has been figuring out algorithms at 100,000,000 times the speed that a traditional computer chip can, and that could make a huge difference in the processing power at our disposal in the future.
n quantum computing (closely linked to quantum mechanics), quantum bits (or 'qubits') can simultaneously hold values of 1, 0, or both, rather than being set to 1 or 0 as traditional electronic bits are. The qubits are tiny particles suspended in temperatures just above absolute zero, and as more qubits are added, the available processing power goes up exponentially. Big data problems, such as weather forecasts or chemical analysis, could be dealt with much faster through the power of quantum computing.
