Google’s Quantum Dream May Be Just Around The Corner

In 1981, Richard Feynman, probably the most famous physicist of his time asked the question: “Can we simulate physics on a computer?” At the time the answer was “theoretically yes,” but practically not at that time. Today, we may be on the verge of answering “yes” in practice to Feynman’s original question. Quantum computers operate in such a strange way and are so radically different from today’s computers that it requires some understanding of quantum mechanics and bizarre properties like “quantum entanglement.” Quantum computers are in a realm orders of magnitude beyond today’s supercomputers. Their application in specific computational problems like cryptography, Big Data analysis, computational fluid dynamics (CFD), and sub-atomic physics will change our World. Canadian quantum computing company, D-Wave Systems has been at the center of Google’s efforts to pioneer this technology.

Reblogged from New Scientist

 

31 August 2016

Revealed: Google’s plan for quantum computer supremacy

The field of quantum computing is undergoing a rapid shake-up, and engineers at Google have quietly set out a plan to dominate

By Jacob Aron

SOMEWHERE in California, Google is building a device that will usher in a new era for computing. It’s a quantum computer, the largest ever made, designed to prove once and for all that machines exploiting exotic physics can outperform the world’s top supercomputers.

And New Scientist has learned it could be ready sooner than anyone expected – perhaps even by the end of next year.

The quantum computing revolution has been a long time coming. In the 1980s, theorists realised that a computer based on quantum mechanics had the potential to vastly outperform ordinary, or classical, computers at certain tasks. But building one was another matter. Only recently has a quantum computer that can beat a classical one gone from a lab curiosity to something that could actually happen. Google wants to create the first.

The firm’s plans are secretive, and Google declined to comment for this article. But researchers contacted by New Scientist all believe it is on the cusp of a breakthrough, following presentations at conferences and private meetings.

“They are definitely the world leaders now, there is no doubt about it,” says Simon Devitt at the RIKEN Center for Emergent Matter Science in Japan. “It’s Google’s to lose. If Google’s not the group that does it, then something has gone wrong.”

We have had a glimpse of Google’s intentions. Last month, its engineers quietly published a paper detailing their plans (arxiv.org/abs/1608.00263). Their goal, audaciously named quantum supremacy, is to build the first quantum computer capable of performing a task no classical computer can.

“It’s a blueprint for what they’re planning to do in the next couple of years,” says Scott Aaronson at the University of Texas at Austin, who has discussed the plans with the team.

So how will they do it? Quantum computers process data as quantum bits, or qubits. Unlike classical bits, these can store a mixture of both 0 and 1 at the same time, thanks to the principle of quantum superposition. It’s this potential that gives quantum computers the edge at certain problems, like factoring large numbers. But ordinary computers are also pretty good at such tasks. Showing quantum computers are better would require thousands of qubits, which is far beyond our current technical ability.

Instead, Google wants to claim the prize with just 50 qubits. That’s still an ambitious goal – publicly, they have only announced a 9-qubit computer – but one within reach.

“It’s Google’s to lose. If Google’s not the group that does it, then something has gone wrong“

To help it succeed, Google has brought the fight to quantum’s home turf. It is focusing on a problem that is fiendishly difficult for ordinary computers but that a quantum computer will do naturally: simulating the behaviour of a random arrangement of quantum circuits.

Any small variation in the input into those quantum circuits can produce a massively different output, so it’s difficult for the classical computer to cheat with approximations to simplify the problem. “They’re doing a quantum version of chaos,” says Devitt. “The output is essentially random, so you have to compute everything.”

To push classical computing to the limit, Google turned to Edison, one of the most advanced supercomputers in the world, housed at the US National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Google had it simulate the behaviour of quantum circuits on increasingly larger grids of qubits, up to a 6 × 7 grid of 42 qubits.

This computation is difficult because as the grid size increases, the amount of memory needed to store everything balloons rapidly. A 6 × 4 grid needed just 268 megabytes, less than found in your average smartphone. The 6 × 7 grid demanded 70 terabytes, roughly 10,000 times that of a high-end PC.

Google stopped there because going to the next size up is currently impossible: a 48-qubit grid would require 2.252 petabytes of memory, almost double that of the top supercomputer in the world. If Google can solve the problem with a 50-qubit quantum computer, it will have beaten every other computer in existence.

Eyes on the prize

By setting out this clear test, Google hopes to avoid the problems that have plagued previous claims of quantum computers outperforming ordinary ones – including some made by Google.

Last year, the firm announced it had solved certain problems 100 million times faster than a classical computer by using a D-Wave quantum computer, a commercially available device with a controversial history. Experts immediately dismissed the results, saying they weren’t a fair comparison.

Google purchased its D-Wave computer in 2013 to figure out whether it could be used to improve search results and artificial intelligence. The following year, the firm hired John Martinis at the University of California, Santa Barbara, to design its own superconducting qubits. “His qubits are way higher quality,” says Aaronson.

It’s Martinis and colleagues who are now attempting to achieve quantum supremacy with 50 qubits, and many believe they will get there soon. “I think this is achievable within two or three years,” says Matthias Troyer at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. “They’ve showed concrete steps on how they will do it.”

Martinis and colleagues have discussed a number of timelines for reaching this milestone, says Devitt. The earliest is by the end of this year, but that is unlikely. “I’m going to be optimistic and say maybe at the end of next year,” he says. “If they get it done even within the next five years, that will be a tremendous leap forward.”

The first successful quantum supremacy experiment won’t give us computers capable of solving any problem imaginable – based on current theory, those will need to be much larger machines. But having a working, small computer could drive innovation, or augment existing computers, making it the start of a new era.

Aaronson compares it to the first self-sustaining nuclear reaction, achieved by the Manhattan project in Chicago in 1942. “It might be a thing that causes people to say, if we want a full-scalable quantum computer, let’s talk numbers: how many billions of dollars?” he says.

Solving the challenges of building a 50-qubit device will prepare Google to construct something bigger. “It’s absolutely progress to building a fully scalable machine,” says Ian Walmsley at the University of Oxford.

For quantum computers to be truly useful in the long run, we will also need robust quantum error correction, a technique to mitigate the fragility of quantum states. Martinis and others are already working on this, but it will take longer than achieving quantum supremacy.

Still, achieving supremacy won’t be dismissed.

“Once a system hits quantum supremacy and is showing clear scale-up behaviour, it will be a flare in the sky to the private sector,” says Devitt. “It’s ready to move out of the labs.”

“The field is moving much faster than expected,” says Troyer. “It’s time to move quantum computing from science to engineering and really build devices.”

D-Wave Quantum Machine Tested by NASA and Google Shows Promise

Researchers from Google’s AI Lab say a controversial quantum machine that it and NASA have been testing since 2013 resoundingly beat a conventional computer in a series of tests.

Source: Controversial Quantum Machine Tested by NASA and Google Shows Promise | MIT Technology Review

Google Says It Has Proved Its Controversial Quantum Computer Really Works

Researchers from Google’s AI Lab say a controversial quantum machine that it and NASA have been testing since 2013 resoundingly beat a conventional computer in a series of tests.

• By Tom Simonite on December 8, 2015

Inside this box is a superconducting chip, cooled to within a fraction of a degree of absolute zero, that might put new power behind artificial-intelligence software.

Google says it has proof that a controversial machine it bought in 2013 really can use quantum physics to work through a type of math that’s crucial to artificial intelligence much faster than a conventional computer.

Governments and leading computing companies such as Microsoft, IBM, and Google are trying to develop what are called quantum computers because using the weirdness of quantum mechanics to represent data should unlock immense data-crunching powers. Computing giants believe quantum computers could make their artificial-intelligence software much more powerful and unlock scientific leaps in areas like materials science. NASA hopes quantum computers could help schedule rocket launches and simulate future missions and spacecraft. “It is a truly disruptive technology that could change how we do everything,” said Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Biswas spoke at a media briefing at the research center about the agency’s work with Google on a machine the search giant bought in 2013 from Canadian startup D-Wave systems, which is marketed as “the world’s first commercial quantum computer.” The computer is installed at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, and operates on data using a superconducting chip called a quantum annealer. A quantum annealer is hard-coded with an algorithm suited to what are called “optimization problems,” which are common in machine-learning and artificial-intelligence software.

However, D-Wave’s chips are controversial among quantum physicists. Researchers inside and outside the company have been unable to conclusively prove that the devices can tap into quantum physics to beat out conventional computers.

Hartmut Neven, leader of Google’s Quantum AI Lab in Los Angeles, said today that his researchers have delivered some firm proof of that. They set up a series of races between the D-Wave computer installed at NASA against a conventional computer with a single processor. “For a specific, carefully crafted proof-of-concept problem we achieve a 100-million-fold speed-up,” said Neven.

Google posted a research paper describing its results online last night, but it has not been formally peer-reviewed. Neven said that journal publications would be forthcoming.

Google’s results are striking—but even if verified, they would only represent partial vindication for D-Wave. The computer that lost in the contest with the quantum machine was running code that had it solve the problem at hand using an algorithm similar to the one baked into the D-Wave chip. An alternative algorithm is known that could have let the conventional computer be more competitive, or even win, by exploiting what Neven called a “bug” in D-Wave’s design. Neven said the test his group staged is still important because that shortcut won’t be available to regular computers when they compete with future quantum annealers capable of working on larger amounts of data.

Matthias Troyer, a physics professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, said making that come true is crucial if chips like D-Wave’s are to become useful. “It will be important to explore if there are problems where quantum annealing has advantages over even the best classical algorithms, and to find if there are classes of application problems where such advantages can be realized,” he said, in a statement with two colleagues.

Last year Troyer’s group published a high-profile study of an earlier D-Wave chip that concluded it didn’t offer advantages over conventional machines. That question has now been partially resolved, they say. “Google’s results indeed show a huge advantage on these carefully chosen instances.”

Google is competing with D-Wave to make a quantum annealer that could do useful work. Last summer the Silicon Valley giant opened a new lab in Santa Barbara, headed by a leading academic researcher, John Martinis (see “Google Launches Effort to Build Its Own Quantum Computer”).

Martinis is also working on quantum hardware that would not be limited to optimization problems, as annealers are. A universal quantum computer, as such a machine would be called, could be programmed to take on any problem and would be much more useful but is expected to take longer to perfect. Government and university labs, Microsoft (see “Microsoft’s Quantum Mechanics”), and IBM (see “IBM Shows Off a Quantum Computing Chip”) are also working on that technology.

John Giannandrea, a VP of engineering at Google who coördinates the company’s research, said that if quantum annealers could be made practical, they would find many uses powering up Google’s machine-learning software. “We’ve already encountered problems in the course of our products impractical to solve with existing computers, and we have a lot of computers,” he said. However, Giannandrea noted, “it may be several years before this research makes a difference to Google products.”

Quantum tech is more than just crazy science: It’s good business from mobile payments to fighting the NSA,

Management students may ask why the title of this post claims that quantum technology is good business. So let me try to explain, and then read on to the PandoDaily post by David Holmes. The bottom line is that some basic understanding of quantum mechanics is going to be a valuable management skill going forward. Why? Read on

Yesterday, National Public Radio in the United States (which can be heard online) broadcast a fascinating discussion about Monday’s announcement of the long awaited breakthrough of proving the existence of gravitational waves which include the fingerprint of the original Big Bang.  Featuring legendary astrophysicist Leonard Susskind of Stanford and a number of other leading physicists, the discussion inevitably drifted to quantum mechanics, and the original Big Bang itself, which Stanford Physics Professor. Chao-Lin Kuo, described as “mind scrambling.”  Quantum entanglement is another area that defies common sense: particles that mimic each other and change faster than the speed of light, which should be impossible.  Einstein’s famous quote, “God does not play dice,” was his reaction to the non-deterministic nature of quantum events and theory, which also violate his general theory of relativity. It turns out the random nature of quantum mechanics provides a superior solution for hideously complex problems, finding the best “probabilistic” solutions. Quantum mechanics is also providing a potential way forward in encryption and privacy.

Read and listen on NPR: Scientists Announce Big Bang Breakthrough

However, all of this “mind scrambling” pure science is rapidly becoming applied science: science becoming useful technological innovation and applied to economic activity.  Some of my students may recall our discussions of Moore’s Law in semiconductor design. As  Moore’s Law reaches it finite limit, quantum “technology” is creating one path forward, and providing new solutions to Internet security and supercomputing.  David Holme’s PandoDaily article today attempts to explain in greater detail why this is important for business. 

Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave Systems has written an excellent explanation in layman’s terms, of the importance of quantum computing, and how it differs from “deterministic” computing.

Read more:  Solving the unsolvable: a quantum boost for supercomputing

Best of all there is an excellent book for those willing to devote the time and grey matter to quantum physics, “Quantum physics, a beginners’ guide,” by Alistair Rae, available in paperback on Amazon or Kindle e-book.