Google
Posted on 09/25/2019 2:50:36 PM PDT by LibWhacker
Google has reportedly demonstrated for the first time that a quantum computer is capable of performing a task beyond the reach of even the most powerful conventional supercomputer in any practical time frame—a milestone known in the world of computing as “quantum supremacy.”
The ominous-sounding term, which was coined by theoretical physicist John Preskill in 2012, evokes an image of Darth Vader–like machines lording it over other computers. And the news has already produced some outlandish headlines, such as one on the Infowars website that screamed, “Google’s ‘Quantum Supremacy’ to Render All Cryptography and Military Secrets Breakable.” Political figures have been caught up in the hysteria, too: Andrew Yang, a presidential candidate, tweeted that “Google achieving quantum computing is a huge deal. It means, among many other things, that no code is uncrackable.”
Nonsense. It doesn’t mean that at all. Google’s achievement is significant, but quantum computers haven’t suddenly turned into computing colossi that will leave conventional machines trailing in the dust. Nor will they be laying waste to conventional cryptography in the near future—though in the longer term, they could pose a threat we need to start preparing for now.
Here’s a guide to what Google appears to have achieved—and an antidote to the hype surrounding quantum supremacy.
We still haven’t had confirmation from Google about what it’s done. The information about the experiment comes from a paper titled “Quantum Supremacy Using a Programmable Superconducting Processor,” which was briefly posted on a NASA website before being taken down. Its existence was revealed in a report in the Financial Times—and a copy of the paper can be found here.
The experiment is a pretty arcane one, but it required a great deal of computational effort. Google’s team used a quantum processor code-named Sycamore to prove that the figures pumped out by a random number generator were indeed truly random. They then worked out how long it would take Summit, the world’s most powerful supercomputer, to do the same task. The difference was stunning: while the quantum machine polished it off in 200 seconds, the researchers estimated that the classical computer would need 10,000 years.
When the paper is formally published, other researchers may start poking holes in the methodology, but for now it appears that Google has scored a computing first by showing that a quantum machine can indeed outstrip even the most powerful of today’s supercomputers. “There’s less doubt now that quantum computers can be the future of high-performance computing,” says Nick Farina, the CEO of quantum hardware startup EeroQ.
In a classical computer, bits that carry information represent either a 1 or a 0; but quantum bits, or qubits—which take the form of subatomic particles such as photons and electrons—can be in a kind of combination of 1 and 0 at the same time, a state known as “superposition.” Unlike bits, qubits can also influence one another through a phenomenon known as “entanglement,” which baffled even Einstein, who called it “spooky action at a distance.”
Thanks to these properties, which are described in more detail in our quantum computing explainer, adding just a few extra qubits to a system increases its processing power exponentially. Crucially, quantum machines can crunch through large amounts of data in parallel, which helps them outpace classical machines that process data sequentially. That’s the theory. In practice, researchers have been laboring for years to prove conclusively that a quantum computer can do something even the most capable conventional one can’t. Google’s effort has been led by John Martinis, who has done pioneering work in the use of superconducting circuits to generate qubits.
No. Google picked a very narrow task. Quantum computers still have a long way to go before they can best classical ones at most things—and they may never get there. But researchers I’ve spoken to since the paper appeared online say Google’s experiment is still significant because for a long time there have been doubts that quantum machines would ever be able to outstrip classical computers at anything.
Until now, research groups have been able to reproduce the results of quantum machines with around 40 qubits on classical systems. Google’s Sycamore processor, which harnessed 53 qubits for the experiment, suggests that such emulation has reached its limits. “We’re entering an era where exploring what a quantum computer can do will now require a physical quantum computer … You won’t be able to credibly reproduce results anymore on a conventional emulator,” explains Simon Benjamin, a quantum researcher at the University of Oxford.
Again, no. That’s a wild exaggeration. The Google paper makes clear that while its team has been able to show quantum supremacy in a narrow sampling task, we’re still a long way from developing a quantum computer capable of implementing Shor’s algorithm, which was developed in the 1990s to help quantum machines factor massive numbers. Today’s most popular encryption methods can be broken only by factoring such numbers—a task that would take conventional machines many thousands of years.
“Right up until the AI is the programmer”
Show me how that’s happening.
Did you power it with a flux capacitor?
Show you how it’s happening?
I posted a link back in post 14 of this thread.
Please tell me it is not beyond your Programmer’s imagination to think of the concepts of intuitive AI being applied to programming itself?
If it hasn’t happened yet, it most surely will.
“Please tell me it is not beyond your Programmer’s imagination to think of the concepts of intuitive AI being applied to programming itself?”
If this means a computer writing programs, who wrote the program that caused the computer to write programs?
Humans, of course.
That does not guarantee, however, that humans will be able to fully grasp and fully understand the working code that such a system would produce.
https://www.enigmaworldcodegroup.com/
We can get several Enigma simulators and even get them in an app.
Now to make it better ...
“able to fully grasp and fully understand the working code that such a system would produce.”
Couldn’t be worse than the piles of working code out there now produced by humans.
Seriously, a computer producing its own code sounds like a dog chasing its tail.
I wrote some code a long time ago that generated code. Purpose was to expand a loop into a liner string of statements in order to eliminate the loop overhead.
Sure it could.
And computers producing their own superior designs through
Intuitive AI is already a thing.
Thought experiment: Multiply the current Windows product
code base size and complexity by a 2 to 4 digit number...
Annually. (Intuitive AI generated.)
Then for input data, give it internet access.
The thing about intuitive AI chasing its own tail...
It gets to do it until it finds a way that works.
Quantum resources means it won't take nearly as long.
“And computers producing their own superior designs through
Intuitive AI is already a thing.And computers producing their own superior designs through
Intuitive AI is already a thing”
Give us a concrete example. Also let us know when quantum computing can take a square root.
“https://www.ted.com/talks/maurice_conti_the_incredible_inventions_of_intuitive_ai";
I watched it. Doesn’t explain what I need explaining.
OK, diving a little deeper...
Application software contributing to its development:
The notion of a process of a data-interpretative synthesis
has already been found in a computational-linguistic
software application that has been created for use in an
internal security context. The software integrates computed
data based specifically on objectives incorporating a
paradigm described as “religious intuitive” hermeneutic
functional to a degree that represents advances upon the
performance of generic lexical data mining.[25][26]
Veeramachaneni and others at MIT developed a machine which
performed comparably to humans in a test of intuitive
intelligence during 2015.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intuition
Quantum Computing resources just make parallel
experimentation and testing, orders of magnitude faster.
An example of Artificial Intuition software coding to go
with the previous example of Artificial Intuition mechanical
design.
It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to see some “There” there.
“OK, diving a little deeper.”
You’re diving into the wrong pool. A lot of fancy sentences but I want to read that quantum computing took a square root, or was programmed in C, or see its assembler language.
Why would you expect any of those things?
None of them apply to the quantum part of Quantum Computing.
Or are the things it DOES and can do, something not to be discussed?
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