World’s first commercial quantum computer really works, says Google

Researchers from Google’s AI Lab have announced that a quantum computer acquired together with NASA from Vancouver-based company D-Wave Systems in 2013 has beaten a conventional computer in a number of tests.

Google has published a research paper claiming that D-Wave quantum computers have proven to be much faster at solving some problems than standard computers running a comparable algorithm.

Google’s interest in the D-Wave machine, which has also been invested in by Microsoft and IBM, is due to the huge power quantum computers could potentially unlock. Rupak Biswas, deputy director of exploration technology at NASA Ames, likened the state of quantum computing to the early development of conventional computers during the 1930s and 40s.

But this new type of computing power available to private corporations can play against the public interest, according to David Poole, a University of British Columbia computer science professor specializing in artificial intelligence.

Dubbed as “the world’s first commercial quantum computer”, the first D-Wave quantum computer faced skepticism among physicists and even researchers who were unable to verify if the computer indeed runs using quantum physics.

He goes on to discuss the possibility of using the performance gains to boost artificial intelligence: “We are optimistic that the significant runtime gains we have found will carry over to commercially relevant problems as they occur in tasks relevant to machine intelligence”.

Eric Ladizinsky, D-Wave’s chief scientist, said when an organization like Google invests in a quantum computing system to develop AI, it’s trying to better understand natural language and the way the human brain recognizes patterns, so machines can learn from experience. In a series of experiments, the team pitted its D-Wave quantum computer against a regular computer with a single processor and had them race through optimization problems known as annealing. In a face to face stand-off, the researchers used simulated annealing on a conventional processor, and quantum annealing on the D-Wave machine. According to Bloomberg, Mountain View’s vice president of engineering, John Giannandrea, said that they have already encountered problems that they would like to solve that are just unfeasible with conventional computing machines.

Quantum computers such as the D-Wave 2X are significantly faster because they run on quantum bits or qubits instead of simple 0’s and 1’s.

Are powerful quantum computers finally here? D-Wave’s machines have been controversial amongst academics, and previous claims of faster computation have been called into question.

Hartmut Neven said at the event. “It may be several years before this research makes a difference to Google products”.

Numerous modern AI problems involve crunching of similar complex numbers to find out optimized solution which make quantum computing an exciting prospect. It can be used to solve very complex problems a lot faster.

Quantum computing has infinite potential, making light work of some of the most challenging tasks, such as simulating the human body’s response to medications, predicting weather patterns, analyzing colossal datasets, creating super-intelligent robots that can learn and continue upgrading themselves, etc.