Transcript
Even as technologies like silicon-germanium and carbon nanotubes
continue to exceed traditional limits for conventional computing,
researchers are busy creating a whole new computing paradigm based on
quantum mechanics.
However, despite the numerous laboratories that have created
proof-of-concept devices, only the Canadian company D-Wave has actually
delivered what it claims to be commercially viable quantum computers.
And, until recently, many experts doubted that D-Wave's technology was
truly performing quantum calculations.
Although, new tests of the only two installed D-Wave computers - one
shared by USC and Lockheed Martin, and another shared by NASA and Google - seem to strongly support the conclusion that these machines are
genuine quantum computers.
This conclusion was documented in several papers, published recently in Nature Physics,that explained why it was possible to reject classical models of the first-generation D-Wave One processor housed at USC.
The tests demonstrated that the D-Wave One behaved in a way that
agrees with a model called "quantum Monte Carlo," and disagreed with two
candidate classical models that could have described the processor in the absence of quantum effects.
Add this to recent work by USC professors demonstrating quantum
entanglement and the evidence is mounting that quantum effects are at
play in the D-Wave processors.
As a result, it's beginning to look like D-Wave's quantum processors
will one day perform optimization calculations much faster than any
traditional processor.
Optimization problems can take many forms, and quantum processors
have been theorized to be useful for a variety of big data problems like
stock portfolio optimization, image recognition and classification, and
detecting anomalies, such as rooting out bugs in complex software.
The first quantum chip housed at USC was a 128-qubit D-Wave One,
which was replaced about a year ago with the 512-qubit D-Wave Two, which
shares the same architecture.
The work at USC and D-Wave is part of a large-scale effort by the
research community aimed at validating the potential of quantum
information processing.
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