Category Archives: Quantum Computer
Top 5: Things to know about quantum computers – TechRepublic
You hear a lot about quantum computers. How they'll be super fast and super powerful. There are even companies claiming to make the first simple versions of quantum computers.
But what makes a computer "quantum?" Here are five things to know about quantum computers.
1. Quantum computers use qubits. While classical computers encode bits as zeros and ones. Qubits can be one, zero or a superposition of both.
2. Because qubits can be in multiple states at once, a quantum computer has inherent paralellism. That means a while your computer can work on one thing at a time, albeit very fast on today's processors, quantum computers can work on millions of things a at a time.
3. Quantum computers will be best at factoring large numbers, making them super fast at breaking encryption or searching a large database.
4. Quantum computers can read data without looking at it. Measuring a qubit can change its state and affect the outcome. So quantum computers entangle atoms, meaning one atom always reflects the state of another. That way you can know what state the first atom is without measuring it and changing its state.
5. There's debate about whether we're really there yet. The uncertainty principle in this case is just how quantum our computers are. Companies like D-Wave use quantum principles in their computing but most agree that practical quantum computers are still years away.
I know what you're thinking. You're in a superposition of both understanding and not understanding quantum computers. Well here's more from TechRepublic to help you out:
SEE: Quantum computing: The smart person's guideSEE: D-Wave quantum computers: The smart person's guide
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Top 5: Things to know about quantum computers - TechRepublic
Artificial intelligence and quantum computing aid cyber crime fight – Financial Times
You enter your password incorrectly too many times and get locked out of your account; your colleague sets up access to her work email on a new device; someone in your company clicks on an emailed Google Doc that is actually aphishing link initially thought to be how the recent spread of the WannaCry computer worm began.
Each of these events leaves a trace in the form of information flowing through a computer network. But which ones should the security systems protecting your business against cyber attacks pay attention to and which should they ignore? And how do analysts tell the difference in a world that is awash with digital information?
The answer could lie in human researchers tapping into artificial intelligence and machine learning, harnessing both the cognitive power of the human mind and the tireless capacity of a machine. Not only will the combination of person and device build stronger defences, their ability to protect networks should also improve over time.
A large company sifts through 200,000 so-called security events every day to figure out which present real threats, according to Caleb Barlow, vice-president of threat intelligence for IBM Security. These include anything from staff forgetting their passwords and being locked out of the system, to the signatures of devices used to access networks changing, to malware attempting to gain entry to corporate infrastructure. A level of rapid-fire triage is desperately needed in the security industry, Mr Barlow says.
The stakes for businesses are high. Last year, 4.2bn records were reported to have been exposed globally in more than 4,000 security breaches, revealing email addresses, passwords, social security numbers, credit card and bank accounts, and medical data, according to analysis by Risk Based Security, a consultancy.
International Data Corporation, a US market research company, forecasts businesses will spend more than $100bn by 2020 protecting themselves from hacking, up from about $74bn in 2016.
Artificial intelligence can improve threat detection, shorten defence response times and refine techniques for differentiating between real efforts to breach security and incidents that can safely be ignored.
Speed matters a lot. [Executing an attack] is an investment for the bad guys, Mr Barlow says. Theyre spending money. If your system is harder to get into than someone elses, they are going to move on to something thats easier.
Daniel Driver of Chemring Technology Solutions, part of the UK defence group, says: Before artificial intelligence, wed have to assume that a lot of the data say 90 per cent is fine. We only would have bandwidth to analyse this 10 per cent.
The AI mimics what an analyst would do, how they look at data, how and why they make decisions...Its doing a huge amount of legwork upfront, which means we can focus our analysts time. That saves human labour, which is far more expensive than computing time.
IBM is also applying AI to security in the form of its Watson cognitive computing platform. The company has taught Watson to read through vast quantities of security research. Some 60,000 security-related blog posts are published every month and 10,000 reports come out every year, IBM estimates. The juicy information is in human-readable form, not machine data, Mr Barlow says.
The company has about 50 customers using Watson as part of its security intelligence and analytics platform. The program learns from every piece of information it takes in.
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It went from literally being a grade-school kid. We had to teach it that a bug is not an insect, its a software defect. A back door doesnt go into a house, it's a vulnerability. Now its providing really detailed insights on particular [threats] and how their campaigns are evolving. And thats just in a matter of months, Mr Barlow says. The more it learns, the faster it gets smarter.
IBM says Watson performs 60 times faster than a human investigator and can reduce the time spent on complex analysis of an incident from an hour to less than a minute.
Another even more futuristic technology could make Watson look as slow as humans: quantum computing. While machine learning and AI speed up the laborious process of sorting through data, the aim is that quantum computing will eventually be able to look at every data permutation simultaneously. Computers represent data as ones or zeros. But Mr Driver says that in a quantum computer these can be: both [zeros and ones] and neither at the same time. It can have super positions. It means we can look through everything and get information back incredibly quickly.
The analogy we like to use is that of a needle in a haystack. A machine can be specially made to look for a needle in a haystack, but it still has to look under every piece of hay. Quantum computing means, Im going to look under every piece of hay simultaneously and find the needle immediately.
He estimates that quantum computing for specific tasks will be more widely available over the next three to five years. On this scale, the technology is still a way off, but there are companies that are developing it.
One company pushing to make quantum computing commercially viable is Canada-based D-Wave, whose customers include Nasa, Lockheed Martin and Google. In January the company sold its newest, most powerful machine to a cyber security company called Temporal Defense Systems, which is using it to work on complex cyber security problems.
But there are risks to using AI technology in security systems. After all, machines that can be taught to think like humans can also be tricked.
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The AI itself is now becoming a target, says Roman Yampolskiy, a professor of computer engineering and computer science at the University of Louisville in the US, who studies artificial intelligence and security.
Hackers may exploit machine learning by gradually teaching a security system that unusual behaviour is normal, known as behavioural drift, he says.
AI can also be used by attackers to fake human voices and create video images that could let criminals into your network. If you get a call from someone whose voice you recognise and they say, I dont have time to talk, give me your password, you will give it to them, Prof Yampolskiy says.
Despite these advances in technology, the core challenge of providing security has not changed, says Mr Driver of Chemring. Its always a cat-and-mouse thing. As soon as you put the gate up higher, then the people will jump higher to get over it."
1. On Friday May 12 2017, mobile operator Telefnica was among the first large organisations to report infection by WannaCry
2. By late morning, hospitals and clinics across the UK began reporting problems to the national cyber incident response centre
3. In Europe, French carmaker Renault was hit; in Germany, Deutsche Bahn became another high-profile victim
4. In Russia, the ministry of the interior, mobile phone provider MegaFon, and Sberbank became infected.
5. Although WannaCrys spread had already been checked, the US was not entirely spared, with FedEx being the highest-profile victim
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Artificial intelligence and quantum computing aid cyber crime fight - Financial Times
Is the US falling behind in the race for quantum computing? – AroundtheO
The invention of the computer drove an explosion of technological innovation like the world has never seen. Now scientists are closing in on creating a new type of computer the quantum computer.
But according to Michael Raymer, a professor of physics at the UO, the United States is lagging behind China and many European countries in theamount of money invested in this new technology, something he sees as a huge mistake. He recently wrote about the problem in The Register-Guard.
A quantum computer is a new kind of computer that could theoretically do things that modern-day computers would be stumped by, such as design new industrial materials or find the ideal molecular structure for a new medicine.
It would be nice if we could leave it up to the private sector to create the first quantum computer, but there are limits to what industry can achieve on its own, he said. Its easy to say that taxpayers shouldnt have to foot the bill for science and engineering, but in many cases, these investments provide exponential returns to the people who pay for them.
He compares this to the Human Genome Project, where scientists were tasked with mapping every bit of human DNA, which led to countless medical breakthroughs.
For more, see his op-ed piece in The Register-Guard, U.S. playing catch-up in quantum computing.
Raymer has been at the UO since 1988. He served as the founding director of the Oregon Center for Optics. His research looks at the quantum mechanics of light and its interaction with atoms and molecules.
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Is the US falling behind in the race for quantum computing? - AroundtheO
IBM Q Offers Quantum Computing as a Service The Merkle – The Merkle
Quantum computing has always sparked the imagination of technology enthusiasts and scientists. Until now, the process to gain access to a supercomputer remains quite expensive. IBM hopes to change all that by launching the Q service, which provides quantum computing as a service. An intriguing development that will potentially spur a new race to build the worlds fastest supercomputer.
On paper, it sounds rather crazy to think anyone in the world could get access to a supercomputer. Most consumers and small businesses do not have any use for this technology whatsoever. Computers and even smartphones are more than powerful enough for consumers looking to complete basic tasks. However, IBM Q is not necessarily designed for the average person on the street.
More specifically, IBM Q is a commercially available universal quantum computer for both businesses and scientists. It is widely believed quantum computing would provide solutions to important problems otherwise too complex to solve through traditional means. It is quite an intriguing project that can currently be accessed free of charge upon providing academic credentials. Do keep in mind users will be somewhat limited as to what they can do during the early stages of IBM Q availability, though.
Under the hood, IBM Q makes use of two universal quantum computing processors. The project provides 16 qubits of computing power for public use and 17 qubits of computing power for commercial use. This first processor can be accessed through the IBM Cloud service at no additional cost, which is a nice gesture. The commercial processor, on the other hand, is twice as powerful as the free version. It is unclear how much access to this resource will cost, though.
Even though this is a major breakthrough in the world of quantum computing, this hardware will not solve every problem in the world. It will also pose no threat to the Bitcoin ecosystem whatsoever, as the computing resources made available both free of charge and in exchange for a payment are not powerful enough to threaten Bitcoins cryptography. Should the available resources be increased in quantity and capacity, that could change in the future. Even then, it seems highly unlikely someone would deliberately try to break Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.
It is quite impressive to see how far we have come in the world of quantum computing. Access to such powerful resources seemed to be strictly off-limits for multiple decades. Yet here we are in the year 2017, a time during which quantum computing as a service became an official service. It is a bit unclear who will use IBM Q the free tier, that is but it is a more than welcome development regardless.
The bigger question is whether or not IBM Q offers an intuitive graphical user interface for people to enjoy. Having access to more powerful computing resources is one thing, but if it is difficult to make sense of it all, IBM Q will only be half as appealing. It will be interesting to see how the general public responds to this development. Rest assured this will generate a buzz of excitement in academic circles, though.
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IBM Q Offers Quantum Computing as a Service The Merkle - The Merkle
Graphene Just Brought Us One Step Closer to Practical Quantum Computers – Futurism
In Brief Researchers are working on creating a quantum capacitor using graphene that is more resistant to electromagnetic interference. This brings us closer to a practical quantum computer. Wonder Material Meets Supercomputer
Right now, graphene and quantumcomputers bothstand out as symbols of the next steps in human technological innovation. Each represents a paradigm shift both in their respective originating fields (materials and computing) as well as in the fields to which they are applied. But perhaps the most exciting developments for these two technologies will come as they combined.
Researchers at EPFLs Laboratory of Photonics and Quantum Measurements have been working to build a quantum capacitor that can create stable qubits (the units of information storage in quantum computers) that are also resistant to common electromagnetic interference. Such a capacitor is easier to produce usinga two dimensionalmaterial such as graphene. Their research was published in2D Materials and Applications.
Quantum computers work by taking advantage of special rules reserved for sub-atomic particles in order to perform the most complex tasks at currently impossible speeds. While theyarent likely to replace our home computers as their capabilities are well beyond our daily needs, what they are capable of will revolutionize whats possible for high-tech applications such as running quantum simulations which can unlock previously impossible to access information.
Taking advantage of graphenes special properties in the designs of quantum capacitors will move us closer to figuring out how to create a practical quantum computer. And this is just one example of graphenes many uses. From the understatedly important capability toturn sea water into drinking water, to the ability to becomezero-resistance superconductors, graphene has the potential to lead us into a new era of science.
Were likelyfar from a functioning practical quantum computer, but watching the beginnings of what might be one of the most significant human technological achievements in our age is quite exciting. Were standing on the precipiceof the next step in our tech evolution.
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Graphene Just Brought Us One Step Closer to Practical Quantum Computers - Futurism
How quantum computing increases cybersecurity risks | Network … – Network World
By Scott Totzke, Network World | May 23, 2017 9:00 AM PT
Opinions expressed by ICN authors are their own.
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Imagine you wake up one morning, assuming everything is as you left it the night before. But overnight, attackers with a quantum computer capable of breaking current cryptography standards have targeted millions of people and stolen their personal data.
Experts have estimated that a commercial quantum computer capable of breaking the cryptography we rely on today will be available by 2026. In fact, IEEE Spectrum reported last year that a quantum computer is close to cracking RSA encryption.
To many people, a nine-year timeline doesnt sound alarming, and the consequences of not updating our security technology with quantum-safe solutions may not be clear. Heres why the work to upgrade to quantum-safe security needs to start now to keep our data safe once quantum computers arrive.
On any given day, you might engage in any of the following common activities as a typical technology user, and if attackers with a quantum computer break the cryptography these transactions rely on, your sensitive data could be leaked, leading to serious consequences for you and the institutions responsible for safeguarding that data:
1. Sending email: You log in to your laptop and send a few personal emails. Your messages can now be read by the attackers and posted publicly for anyone to read.
2. Checking an online bank account: You log in to your bank account and transfer money. Your financial data is now accessible by the attackers who can use it to drain your accounts.
3. Updating your social media accounts: You log in to Facebook and post a personal update about your upcoming vacation and some pictures of your family, assuming you are sharing only with your friends. All photos and personal information are now publicly visible and can be modified by people other than you.
4. Updating software on a smartphone: You get a software update to your smartphone and accept it, not realizing that the authentication process that assures the update comes from a trusted source (i.e. Google or Apple) is now broken. Malware can now be pushed to your smartphone in the guise of a trusted update, giving the attackers further access to any login credentials for apps you have stored, as well as your data.
5. Driving your connected car: You get into your car to drive to work. Your cars computer accepts software updates automatically. Those updates could now come from the attackers, without your knowledge, allowing a third party to take control of the embedded systems in your car and override your navigation, cut power to your vehicle, and more.
Many other daily transactions we take for granted could immediately become vulnerable. For example, using a formerly secure IoT-connected device, such as a thermostat, home security system, or baby monitor; transferring funds to a pre-loaded payment for a public transportation system; or using a VPN to log in to a corporate network. Many public safety risks that are also introduced when public transport vehicles, safety systems, and physical access systems can be compromised.
We already see rapidly increasing numbers of data breaches as more connected devices make more attack surfaces available. As companies and governments work continually to protect against cybersecurity attacks through advances in technology, the advent of quantum computing could create a free for all for cybercriminals.
But there is a solution in the form of quantum-safe cryptography. The key will be updating quantum-vulnerable solutions in time, and that means understanding now which systems will be affected by quantum risk and planning a migration to potential quantum-safe security solutions that includes appropriate testing and piloting.
The transition can begin with hybrid solutions that allow for agile cryptography implementations designed to augment the classical cryptography we use today.
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How quantum computing increases cybersecurity risks | Network ... - Network World
US playing catch-up in quantum computing – The Register-Guard
The May 14 Commentary essay, Miracle Machine needs fuel, co-authored by Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, touted quantum computing as an upcoming revolutionary technology with the capability to affect our lives in major ways, and argued that government support for its development is essential. Schmidt is correct: The time is right for a major U.S. investment in quantum computing.
Most technologies that benefit us resulted from earlier science breakthroughs, many of which were enabled by government investment. For example, the Internet was invented by university and industry scientists supported by federal government grants. When it became operational, it was supported further through infrastructure investments for many years until private corporations saw the benefit of taking it on.
Now an international race is on to see who can create the first working quantum computer and to put it to beneficial uses.
What is quantum computing, and how is it revolutionary?
A quantum computer would be able to compute answers to many important problems that no ordinary computer could handle: designing new industrial materials, determining the optimal molecular structures of pharmaceutical drugs, monitoring patterns of activity in communication networks, searching databases and other yet-to-be discovered applications.
Ordinary computers store each bit of information in the states of miniature electrical switches. A switch can be on or off to represent a bit of data. A program of switching these on and off drives a computers operation.
A quantum computer would store information in quantum switches, or qubits, which can in a sense be in the on state and the off state simultaneously. This gives quantum computers unique capabilities.
The challenges to building working quantum computers are formidable. Controlling qubits is extremely difficult because they can be disrupted by any unwanted outside influence.
Scientists have yet to create a quantum computer, but they are getting closer. They have learned how to tame qubits and entice them to perform the needed steps to carry out calculations using quantum principles.
Some leading companies, including IBM, Microsoft, Google and Intel, have begun investing in efforts to construct quantum computers. But a gap exists between the kind of trained experts the companies need and the available scientific labor pool. What is needed are quantum engineers, and industry is not in a position to train such a workforce. And, really, at this point no one has the engineering know-how to build quantum computers.
Other kinds of quantum technologies are also on the horizon. Quantum communication technologies have been invented that can promise complete security against messages being intercepted and read while in transit over the Internet. Quantum-based gravity sensors and accelerometers can be used in geo-exploration and in navigation where GPS is unavailable. And quantum magnetic-field sensors can enhance medical diagnostic technology and research.
For these reasons, I recently became involved with a wide cohort of scientists and engineers in industry, government laboratories and universities who are calling for a major national investment in developing the engineering framework and scientific workforce needed to bring quantum technologies to fruition. This would be a quantum moonshot effort, like the government-funded Human Genome Project, which now affects medical research and practice in big ways, and creates growth in the economy.
Following a meeting last fall at the White House Office of Science and Technology, some of us began working together and with professional scientific societies to encourage a major federal investment in quantum technologies, including quantum computers.
The U.S. is playing catch up, as European governments are investing around $2 billion and it is believed Chinas investment in quantum technology is moving quickly, including the launch of a quantum-enabled satellite.
It would be nice if we could leave it up to the private sector to create the first quantum computer, but there are limits to what industry can achieve on its own. Its easy to say that taxpayers shouldnt have to foot the bill for science and engineering, but in many cases these investments provide exponential returns to the people who pay for them. The Internet, GPS, medical imagers, and countless other innovations have come about thanks to federally funded basic and applied research.
Ultimately, these partnerships benefit the taxpayers, private industry and society. The same kind of successes can be had with quantum technology, but only if we commit to a race whose finish is far closer than once thought.
To hear about the development of quantum computers from one of the pioneers in the field, you can attend the free public lecture at 7 p.m. May 30 by Nobel prize-winning physicist David Wineland, in the Straub Hall auditorium on the University of Oregon campus.
Michael Raymer, a University of Oregon professor of physics, is the author of Quantum Physics: What Everyone Needs to Know.
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US playing catch-up in quantum computing - The Register-Guard
Researchers push forward quantum computing research – The … – Economic Times
San Francisco, May 21 (IANS) Stanford University electrical engineering Professor Jelena Vuckovic and colleagues at her laboratory are working on new materials that could become the basis for quantum computing.
While silicon transistors in traditional computers push electricity through devices to create digital ones and zeros, quantum computers work by isolating spinning electrons inside a new type of semiconductor material.
When a laser strikes the electron, it reveals which way it is spinning by emitting one or more quanta, or particles, of light.
Those spin states replace the ones and zeros of traditional computing.
In her studies of nearly 20 years, Vuckovic has focused on one aspect of the challenge: creating new types of quantum computer chips that would become the building blocks of future systems, Xinhua reported.
The challenge is developing materials that can trap a single, isolated electron.
To address the problem, the Stanford researchers have recently tested three different approaches, one of which can operate at room temperature, in contrast to what some of the world's leading technology companies are trying with materials super-cooled to near absolute zero, the theoretical temperature at which atoms would cease to move.
In all three cases, the researchers started with semiconductor crystals, namely materials with a regular atomic lattice like the girders of a skyscraper.
By slightly altering this lattice, they sought to create a structure in which the atomic forces exerted by the material could confine a spinning electron.
One way to create the laser-electron interaction chamber is through a structure known as a quantum dot, or a small amount of indium arsenide inside a crystal of gallium arsenide.
The atomic properties of the two materials are known to trap a spinning electron.
In a paper published in Nature Physics, Kevin Fischer, a graduate student in the Vuckovic lab, describes how the laser-electron processes can be exploited within such a quantum dot to control the input and output of light.
By sending more laser power to the quantum dot, the researchers could force it to emit exactly two photons rather than one. It has advantages over other leading quantum computing platforms but still requires cryogenic cooling.
So, the result may not be useful for general-purpose computing, but quantum dot could have applications in creating tamper-proof communications networks.
Another way to electron capture, as Vuckovic and her colleagues have investigated in two other cases, is to modify a single crystal to trap light in what is called a colour centre.
In a paper published in NanoLetters, Jingyuan Linda Zhang, a graduate student in Vuckovic's lab, described how a 16-member research team replaced some of the carbon atoms in the crystalline lattice of a diamond with silicon atoms.
The alteration created colour centres that effectively trapped spinning electrons in the diamond lattice.
Like the quantum dot, however, most diamond colour centre experiments require cryogenic cooling.
But the field is still in its early days, and the researchers aren't sure which method or methods will win out.
"We don't know yet which approach is best, so we continue to experiment," Vuckovic noted.
--IANS
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Researchers push forward quantum computing research - The ... - Economic Times
The route to high-speed quantum computing is paved with error | Ars … – Ars Technica UK
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When it comes toquantum computing, mostly I get excited about experimental results rather than ideas for new hardware. New devicesor new ways to implement old devicesmay end up being useful,but we won'tknow for sure when the results are in. If we are to grade existing ideas by their usefulness, then adiabatic quantum computing has to beright up there, since you can use it to perform some computations now. And at this point, adiabatic quantum computing has the best chance of getting the number of qubits up.
But qubits aren't everythingyou also need speed. Sohow, exactly, do you compare speeds between quantum computers? If you begin looking into thisissue, you'll quickly learnit's far more complicated than anyone really wanted it to be. Even when you can compare speeds today, you also want to be able to estimate how much better you could do with an improved version of the same hardware. This, it seems, often proveseven more difficult.
Unlike classical computing, speed itself is not so easy to define for a quantum computer. If we just take something like D-Wave's quantum annealer as an example, it has no system clock, and it doesn't use gates that perform specific operations. Instead, the whole computer goes through a continuous evolution from the state in which it was initialized to the state that, hopefully, contains the solution. The time that takesis called the annealing time.
At this point, you can all say, "Chris ur dumb, clearly the time from initialization to solution is what counts." Except, I used the word hopefully in that sentence above for good reason. No matter how a quantum computer is designed and operated, the readout process involves measuring the states of the qubits. That means there is a non-zero probability of getting the wrong answer.
This does not mean that a quantum computer is useless. First, for some calculations, it is possible to check a solution very efficiently. Finding prime factors is a good example. I simply multiply the factors together; if the answer doesn't come to the number I initialized the computer with, I know it got it wrong. In case of a wrong answer, I simply repeat the computation. When you can't efficiently check the solution, you can rely on statistics: the correct answer is the most probable outcome of any measurement of the final state. I can just run the same computation multiple times and determine the correct answer from the statistical distribution of the results.
So for an adiabatic quantum computer, this means speed is the annealing time multiplied by the number of runs required to determine the most probable outcome. While notthe most satisfactory answer, it's stillbetter than nothing.
Unfortunately, these two factors are not independent of each other. During annealing, the computation requires that all the qubits stay in the ground state. However, fast changes are more likely to disturb the qubits out of the ground stateso decreasing the annealing time increases the probability of getting an incorrect result. Do the work faster, andyou may need to perform the computation more times to correctly determine the most probable outcome. And as you decrease the annealing time, wrong answers will eventually become so probable that they are indistinguishable from correct answers.
Sodetermining the annealing time of an adiabatic quantum computer has something of a trial-and-error approach to it. The underlying logic is that slower is probably better, but we'll go as fast as we dare. A new paperpublished inPhysical Review Lettersshows that, actually, under the right conditions, it might be better to throw caution to the wind and speed up even more. However, that speed comes at the cost of high peak power consumption.
To recap,in an adiabatic quantum computer, the qubits are all placed in the ground state of some simple global environment. That environment is then modified such that the ground state is the solution to some problem that you want to solve. Now, provided that the qubits remain in the ground state as you change the environment, you will then obtain the correct solution.
The key liesin how fast you are allowed to modify the environment. If you do it very slowly, someone with a slide rule might beat you to the answer. If you do it very fast, your computation is likely to go wrong because the qubits leave the ground state. Fast modifications also require high peak power, so there is a trade-off between speed, power, and accuracy.
To understand the trade-off, let's use an example. Imagine the equivalent of a quantum ball and spring, otherwise known as the harmonic oscillator. In its lowest energy state, the oscillator is bouncing up and down with some natural frequency, which is given by the stiffness of the spring and the mass of the oscillator. In this case, changing the environment would mean increasing or decreasing the stiffness of the spring. To complete the analogy, the jumps between different quantum states increase and decrease the amplitude of oscillation, but those jumps don't change the frequency.
Next, imagine that we reduce the stiffness of the spring, making the system a bit floppier. The oscillation frequency slows, and the amplitude should also drop, but it will take a little time. If the pace of reduction is too fast, then the amplitude remains high for a moment, corresponding more closelyto an excited state. As a result, the oscillator might leave the ground state.
To avoid this, we have to change the spring stiffness at a rate that is slow enough for the oscillator to bleed off the excess energy. Likewise, if we tighten the spring, the process gives energy to the oscillator. If we give it all that energy in one big lump, then it will be sufficient for the oscillator to jump to the excited state, if only briefly.
You can also think of this in terms of power. Although we might change the stiffness of the spring between two values, and therefore expend some amount of energy, the total power depends on how fast we make that change. A short sharp change requires high power, while a long slow change requires low power. So, you can think of three parameters that should be optimized: the speed of the change, the power consumption to complete the change, and the chance that the change drives the qubit out of the ground state.
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The route to high-speed quantum computing is paved with error | Ars ... - Ars Technica UK
IBM’s Newest Quantum Computing Processors Have Triple the Qubits of Their Last – Futurism
In BriefIBM has announced that it has built and tested its two mostpowerful platforms for quantum computing to date. Members of thepublic can request beta access to use the 16 qubit platform to runexperiments and help propel quantum computing technology forward. Quantum Computing Leaps
Due to their complexity, quantum computers are still largely inaccessible for the average person, which is why developers and programmers jumped at the chance to test out IBMs five qubit quantum computing processor when the company offered thepublic free access to it last year, running more than 300,000 experiments on the cutting-edge machine.
Now, the company is taking the tech to the next level, announcing yesterdaythat it has built and tested its two most powerful platforms for quantum computing to date: the 16 qubit Quantum Experience universal computer and a 17 qubit commercial processor prototype that will serve as the core for its IBM Q commercial system.
IBMs 16 qubit processor will make far more complex computations possible without breaking a symbolic quantum sweat. Once again, the company is hoping that developers, programmers, researchers, and anyone working in the field will make use of the platform. To that end, anyone interested in using it for experiments to help usher in the age of quantum computingis encouraged tovisit GitHubs Software Development Kit to request beta access. Otherwise, they can simply access theIBM experience libraryto play around with the technology.
Of course, IBM is far from satisfied with just 16 or 17 qubits. The company hopes to significantly ratchet up the power with a goal of achieving a 50 qubit quantum computing platform or maybe one with even more power in the next few years.
Quantum computing technology has the capacity to solving extraordinarily complex problems problems that in many cases may be difficult for us to even conceive of right now. This potential has been propelling research forward at a remarkable rate, with researchers smashing through milestone after milestone along the path toward commercial quantum computing.
In August 2016, a quantum logic gate with an amazing 99.9 percent precision was achieved, removing a critical theoretical benchmark. Meanwhile, researchers used microwave signals to encode quantum computing data, offering an alternative to optical solutions. In October 2016, researchers used silicon atoms to produce qubits that remained in stable superposition 10 times longer than any qubits before them.
However, as each technical barrier has fallen, the need for public collaboration has become more apparent. In January, Canadian quantum computing company D-Waveopen-sourced its own quantum software tool, Qbsolv, allowing programmers to work on a quantum system whether or not they had any prior experience withquantum computing. With IBM now offering an even-more-powerfulsystem for experimentation, the public now has at its disposal a tool that could lead to remarkable advancements in nearly every field imaginable. As experts have announced, we truly are now living in the age of quantum computing.
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IBM's Newest Quantum Computing Processors Have Triple the Qubits of Their Last - Futurism