The search giant Google is one of the most advanced tech company in the modern world. As a pioneer in many fields of computing and internet, the company wants 'revolutionary new powerful quantum algorithms' to power its operations, including ranking search results, digital personal assistants, spam filtering, and many of its services.
Supercomputer for quantum algorithm could be the most powerful computers the world has yet to implement properly, and it's no surprise that Google as the biggest internet company is testing one out.
Google has purchased a quantum computer from D-Wave Systems, the maker of "the world's first commercially available quantum computer".
Despite the claim is controversial, in theory, quantum computers offer a greater advantages over ordinary type of computing. This is because quantum computer can compute both 0 and 1 binary bits at the same time. Something that ordinary computers, or supercomputers couldn't do.
The company that claims to be the only one selling chips powered by exotic physics, has yet to fully demonstrate the capabilities of its quantum chipsets.
Hungry for Computing Power
Quantum computers that can work a lot faster than ordinary computing power is certainly attracting companies that work with large volume of data, like Google. Such fast computing power and calculation ability can help companies in doing certain task that previously needs more resources, time and money.
Google is not the only one that have an eye set on quantum computing. NASA, and the Universities Space Research Association (USRA) have collaborated in the launch of Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab based on the D-Wave Two 512-qubit quantum computer. Lockheed Martin has also collaborated with D-Wave Systems and applied the quantum computing power to some of its most challenging computation problems.
Their collaborations are easy to state, if difficult to achieve: "The goal is to develop quantum AI [artificial intelligence] algorithms, test them on real world problems and quantify the gains over classical computing machinery."
Before, quantum computer are built with a few qubits which can handle problems that can be also solved using ordinary computers. But since 2007, D-Wave Systems announced its first 16-qubit chip that can solve Sudoku problems by exploiting quantum mechanics. Since them, the company has repeatedly add the number of qubits in their computers.
To explore the advantage and ability, D-Wave cooled the qubits to as close to absolute zero whenever possible by putting the chips inside a custom fridge the size of a small room. However, critics doubted this and said that this energy-landscape approach isn't clear and wouldn't provide any advantage. They also doubt that D-Wave's computers can be concluded as a proper quantum computers.
Researchers said that the way to prove quantumness is to show whether the qubits have a properly called entanglement. This can't be measured directly while the computers are operating, so it has to be inferred by other means. D-Wave has published a number of studies to try and demonstrate such properties, but the crucial question of whether they were actually involved in computation remained open.
A team led by Google's Hartmut Neven has found that the computer performed better at lower temperatures - which suggests it was harnessing quantum effects during computation. But the results still didn't show the wanted quantum speed promised by theory.
The team highlighted that the progress made so far is "a big step" towards proving a speed-up compared to a version of D-Wave that had no quantum properties.
Google has been developing its own quantum computing operations, separate from D-Wave, by hiring John Martinis of the University of California. The company is building its own quantum annealer by creating new hardware to achieve quantum speed. Google's research represents a complementary, slow-but-steady approach to building a quantum annealer that could potentially deliver better performance in the long run.
For the company's short-term goal, Google wants to use the Martinis team's expertise to build a more stabilized version of a quantum annealer that can ensure longer coherence times for the system's fragile qubits.
Google approaches quantum computing in a much slower pace that D-Wave. When D-Wave quickly add the number of qubits in their computers aiming to faster performance, Google is keeping it steady and slow to ensure their systems to be more reliable and predictable.
"We're taking the approach that if we have longer coherence times, maybe the quantum annealer would work better," said Martinis. "We know how to make coherent qubits and scale them up."
Martinis hopes that his team can roughly double the number of qubits every year, pushing the numbers through "brute-force" scaling. "Forty qubits is a large enough number so that you can really tell if the device is going to give any interesting performance," said Martinis.
With faster and more powerful computing power, tech companies can deliver better services with more reliability. Despite there is no guarantee that a quantum computer can be better than a regular computer, Google wants to be the first the find out.
"One of the things that really attracted me to Google was Hartmut’s real desire to solve computer science problems with a quantum computer, not in the long term but in an immediate way," explained Martinis. "Now we have the opportunity to work hard and really try to do that."
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