Posted on 12/05/2011 6:33:06 PM PST by Vince Ferrer
Last Friday, I realized the sort of place I work in: an academic Computer Science institute that bears more than a passing resemblence to the ficticious TV town of 'Eureka'. We don't have flying cars, or intelligent, rebellious, precocious attack bots, but we do have some cool stuff. Take the 128-QuBit Quantum Computer housed the ground floor of parking lot where a sandwich shop used to be, for example. This is the next generation of computers, using the superposition effects of quantum mechanics to process vastly many more states than our current 'classical' computers can accomplish. This is the sort of stuff that really good sci-fi writers incorporate into their novels, it's hardcore-science-at-the-bleeding edge and it's chugging away, downstairs from me right now.
They had a ribbon-cutting ceremony today for this amazing, dramatic machine today. I looked around the main seminar room at ISI and saw more suits and ties than I have ever seen there except when, perhaps, the Provost visited us earlier this year. There were some discussions from the head of the institute, the chief of Lockheed Martin, the Dean of the School of Engineering and then Geordie Rose stood up. This guy is the Founder and CTO of D-Wave, the company that makes the Quantum Computer we now have in our basement (so to speak) and he gave us a phenomenal presentation.
He began with an anecdote: of how a chance meeting with his professor in a business class that he took whilst he was taking his Ph.D. in theoretical physics had lead, eventually to this moment; how that original meeting might not have happened had he not bothered to complete an assignment he wanted at the time to ditch (so remember kids, do your homework!). He told us how he had started the company in 1999 and this was the first sale he had made (12 years is a hell of a long time to keep any sort of dream going on fumes like that) and we could see how thrilled he was to be here, now, showing us this stuff. He told us a little of how the system worked and attempted, at one point, to rush through the technical details (accompanied by howls of protest from the assembled geeks in rapt attention).
The system operates at 20 milli-Kelvin (0.02 degrees above absolute zero), which is 100 times colder than intergalactic space. In fact, his machine is probably one of the coldest points in the universe, unless there are any other lifeforms out there building similar machines. The machine is incredibly well-shielded from stray magnetic fields so that only one other device on the planet has a better 'magnetic vaccuum'. He was practical in his descriptions, showing us circuit diagrams, explaining the physics, describing the sorts of computations we might be able to do on this device.
Basically, my take-away message was that we will be able to do computations involving many many more parameters than previously possible. Even now, he's promised the next upgrade of the chip (going from 128-QuBits to 512-QuBits) might allow us to speed up a computation that would take 320,000 years to perform classically to a mere 120 ms. Naturally, this was talk for venture capitalists, but still, awesome stuff. The way we need to frame our thinking is to use the tools of Machine Learning approaches that many in the AI community use already. OK, this, I think, is something we can do. Already, colleagues at USC have worked on preliminary studies on 'Quantum Adiabtatic Machine Learning' on this system, and it was a sobering moment when Geordie looked at us all with a serious expression at the end of his talk and said: "What I want from you are Nature and Science papers that use this machine and demonstrate its capabilities". I realized the sort of place I work in. We have a responsibility to realize these visions. We have a commitment to attempt to push the envelope. I feel that this is the greatest privelege a human being can have in life, to attempt to make a difference through innovation, ideas and action.
What a day to finally arrive in Eureka.
Here is the video presentation.
It will be the machine that busted every known cipher, if it lives up to its hype. Surprised the CIA hasn’t ordered one.
But can it play chess?
Would you like to play a game?
Joshua? Is that you?
I was looking into this about 6 years ago. The state then was that you could do about 4 bits before decoherence set in. 128 qbits is a far way to come in the time but I remember the D-Wave work from back in the day and they did seem to have something going. I’m downloading the Silverlight (thank you MS) plug in now to look at this. Thanks.
Open the pod-bay doors, HAL.
holy smokes! I thought this was still science fiction!
128 qubit.
Just a few years ago, 4 qubits was what they started with.
In 198? I paid $400 for 4K of binary static memory.
This month? I bought 16GB (dynamic, not static) for about $50 for my reader. I have problems seeing it. I modified tweezers to manipulate it. But the
dfcommand assures me it's there. And stuff goes into it and comes back out.
So from 4k for $400 to 16G for $50 in 30 years? I may still have 30 years left in me.
I expect that I'll be amazed at the prices, speeds, and capacities when I read my last advertisement before I hit the big CPU in the sky.
/johnny
Beats the heck out of the old P-2 running Win 95 SE I have cranked up over in the corner.
Twelve of this one is apparently inferior to a single unit embracing four times as many of these “qubits.”
The theory of programming one of these puppies must make the likes of C++ look positively like cuneiform in the stone age. It looks to me like it’s best suited to huge search spaces. Picking apart DNA to the point of making truly designer critters feasible?
DARPA is doing this in parallel /pun
How do you know they haven't?
If they have, I doubt the public would know during your lifetime.
what good would it do them? They can’t figure out if Russia will fall as a communist state, if Iraq will be stable after an invasion or if Iran is ready for it’s next Green revolution.
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