NASA and Google reveal 1,097 qubit Quantum computer the DWave 2X

[disappoint]

So the news is that it solved an optimization problem about 100 million times faster than a regular computer with a single processor.

Cool to see new advancements in Quantum computing. I thought they'd be decades away from a working model that has commercial application.

Cue "Yeah but can it run Crysis" jokes now.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3013214/hardware/nasa-google-reveal-quantum-computing-leap.html

 

[Joepublic2]

Cool beans. I wonder if it can be used to defeat common encryption methods. Quote:

The researchers see it as a promising step, but it comes with some caveats -- not the least of which is that the computer was engineered for the specific optimization task it was tested with.

Conventional ASICs can already outperform general purpose CPUs for specific tasks by a factor of 1000x or more, so it's not quite as impressive as if it could solve general problems 100 million times faster. Still, a huge advancement. I'd like to see a perf/watt/size comparison vs. traditional general purpose hardware for more general computational problems (if it's capable of analyzing general problems).

 

[Moonbeam]

It's predicted to potentially have a huge impact on AI.

 

[brianmanahan]

awesome! i actually wanted to do my thesis on some aspect of quantum computing, but couldn't find something doable in the timeframe i was shooting for.

and tbh, this would get a lot more traction in OT. most of the vocal residents of P&N care way more about P than N. and if they read N, they insist of finding a way to tie it back to P.

 

[disappoint]

awesome! i actually wanted to do my thesis on some aspect of quantum computing, but couldn't find something doable in the timeframe i was shooting for.

and tbh, this would get a lot more traction in OT. most of the vocal residents of P&N care way more about P than N. and if they read N, they insist of finding a way to tie it back to P.

You're right it would get more attention in OT. But I did a search to see if anyone had posted it yet by searching for DWave and someone posted about a year ago some earlier model that did only 128 qubits and it was in P&N so I took that to mean it belonged here.

 

[brianmanahan]

ah yeah i remember that thread

if they ever get general purpose computing working with quantum, dang

 

[disappoint]

ah yeah i remember that thread

if they ever get general purpose computing working with quantum, dang

Yeah this is that thread: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2167528&highlight=dwave

So hard to resist saying: Yeah it would be a quantum leap in general computing.

The article author wrote:

An optimization problem is one where there are many possible ways to arrive at a desired outcome. The classic example is a traveling salesman who has to find the most efficient route to visit a number of towns. As more towns are added, the number of possible routes increases, and soon there are too many for a conventional computer to handle in a reasonable amount of time.
Similar problems exist on space missions and in air traffic control modeling -- both areas to which NASA devotes significant computing resources.
The problem used to test the D-Wave computer had nearly 1,000 such variables.

Doesn't sound like something suited to general computing but what about AI? Sounds like it might be great at that.

 

[Knowing]

Peter Guttman on quantum computing in 2012

Brian Snow on quantum computing in 2015

Is it really quantum? Their last one wasn't. I don't think the future is here yet, but I expect it will arrive much faster than we expect it.

 

[Chiropteran]

I don't think it's actually a quantum computer.

I think it uses conventional computer hardware and some interesting software to simulate a quantum computer.

 

[Chiropteran]

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2555

Yeah, nothing impressive yet. Sorry, try again.

 

[Sonikku]

But can it run....

damnit.

 

[woolfe9998]

Carbon nanotubes seem to be the most viable alternative to silicon right now, if measured by how close we are. And that is likely 10 years or more off.

http://www.digitaljournal.com/techn...ters-1000x-faster-than-today-s/article/444657

 

[Brian Stirling]

It's predicted to potentially have a huge impact on AI.

So, how long before Skynet?


Brian

 

[blankslate]

So, how long before Skynet?


Brian

Not Skynet....


Star Trek.

with these new computers we'll be able to develop GMO foods with no side-effects; figure out how to develop and power faster than light engines for long range exploration ships.

scarcity of resources will be gone because we'll be able to use these computers to create solar panels with at least 300% the efficiency of current technology for starters.

Battery life, capacity and charge times will increase to the point where even-gearheads will bow down before the superiority of future electric cars.

The energy required to desalinate and purify water on a large scale will not be much of an issue because of the previously mentioned improvements in energy technology.

In the near term before the development of FTL drives sublight speed travel will still become much faster do the point there a trip to Mars will take a week or two then just days. This will enable us to terraform Mars and relieve pressure on the Earth's ecosystem and climate such that all the damage to them in the past century will be gradually revered.

It'll be great!

Aside from the fact that we'll be eating bugs for the main protein source for awhile until replicator technology is developed



__________________

 

[Genx87]

So the news is that it solved an optimization problem about 100 million times faster than a regular computer with a single processor.

Cool to see new advancements in Quantum computing. I thought they'd be decades away from a working model that has commercial application.

Cue "Yeah but can it run Crysis" jokes now.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3013214/hardware/nasa-google-reveal-quantum-computing-leap.html

I for one welcome this box as our new overlord.

 

[werepossum]

Man, I bet that would crush Fallout 4!

With this tool, NASA will surely succeed in their core roles of documenting CAGW and making Muslim nations feel better about their contributions to science, while Google can deliver adverts tailored not only to my interests but also to my mood.

 

[werepossum]

I for one welcome this box as our new overlord.

lol And I would like to point out that some of us can still be useful for carrying heavy objects and polishing those hard to reach parts.

 

[disappoint]

http://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=2555

Yeah, nothing impressive yet. Sorry, try again.

The author of the blog article you posted, while not all that excited by the latest D-Wave offering, seems pretty excited about quantum computing in general:

In the meantime, while it’s sometimes easy to forget during blog-discussions, the field of experimental quantum computing is a proper superset of D-Wave, and things have gotten tremendously more exciting on many fronts within the last year or two. In particular, the group of John Martinis at Google (Martinis is one of the coauthors of the Google paper) now has superconducting qubits with orders of magnitude better coherence times than D-Wave’s qubits, and has demonstrated rudimentary quantum error-correction on 9 of them. They’re now talking about scaling up to ~40 super-high-quality qubits with controllable couplings—not in the remote future, but in, like, the next few years. If and when they achieve that, I’m extremely optimistic that they’ll be able to show a clear quantum advantage for something (e.g., some BosonSampling-like sampling task), if not necessarily something of practical importance. IBM Yorktown Heights, which I visited last week, is also working (with IARPA funding) on integrating superconducting qubits with many-microsecond coherence times. Meanwhile, some of the top ion-trap groups, like Chris Monroe’s at the University of Maryland, are talking similarly big about what they expect to be able to do soon. The “academic approach” to QC—which one could summarize as “understand the qubits, control them, keep them alive, and only then try to scale them up”—is finally bearing some juicy fruit.
(At last week’s IBM conference, there was plenty of D-Wave discussion; how could there not be? But the physicists in attendance—I was almost the only computer scientist there—seemed much more interested in approaches that aim for longer-laster qubits, fault-tolerance, and a clear asymptotic speedup.)
I still have no idea when and if we’ll have a practical, universal, fault-tolerant QC, capable of factoring 10,000-digit numbers and so on. But it’s now looking like only a matter of years until Gil Kalai, and the other quantum computing skeptics, will be forced to admit they were wrong—which was always the main application I cared about anyway!

 

[DrPizza]

NASA? Can you imagine the cgi that they'll have in 10 more years? They'll be able to completely able to fake the Mars landing, and not even need actors on a sound stage somewhere, pretending to be astronauts.

 

[Jeff7]

Popular Science article.


In an unrelated matter, the world saw a sudden flood of 30 billion new Bitcoins.

 

[88keys]

It's predicted to potentially have a huge impact on AI.

I think AI is mostly a software issue. Greater computing power will simply enable AI to make more bad decisions at a faster rate.