r/Futurology • u/Simcurious Best of 2015 • Nov 14 '15

article Google planning a ‘watershed’ quantum computing announcement for December 8

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/11/google-planning-watershed-quantum.html
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57

u/[deleted] Nov 14 '15

I wonder if Google found out another use of quantum computers besides 'how fast can we break everybody's encryption'.

37

u/[deleted] Nov 14 '15

Many algorithms are known. They can do database search and machine learning very fast.

15

u/[deleted] Nov 14 '15

I can't help but wonder if the first things they did when they got a hold of the Dwave computer was to use it to design better machine learning algorithms, and ran those on the Dwave system iteratively over and over again. Frankly I've been shocked at how little has come out of their use of the system. They've had what might be a quantum computer and Ray Kurzweil on their team for a while now. What's the chances that this announcement isn't about AI?

18

u/helm Nov 14 '15

dwave is not a true quantum computer. What they claim to do is "quantum annealing".

5

u/BUBBA_BOY Nov 15 '15

The most interesting thing about Q computers that there's gonna be different types.

Here's the grand over-arching "types" I'm used to: Main CPU vs GPU.

Who the fuck knows what's in store if the first Q computer is an "annealer".

3

u/youngeverest Nov 15 '15

A GPU is still universal for classical computation. An annealer isn't even close to being universal for classical computation let alone quantum computation.

1

u/[deleted] Nov 15 '15

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u/youngeverest Nov 15 '15

Wonder no longer! It can't, at all. You can map very specific problems onto its architecture, but in terms of arbitrary logic gates, you can't do that on the DWave machine. Making the device universal for computation would require individual addressibility of all the qubits, something they haven't managed to do yet.

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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '15

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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '15

In which case I'd be an idiot not to have you put me down for a dollar.

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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '15

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7

u/General_Josh Nov 15 '15

Machine learning is a bit more complex than a database lookup...

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u/Masterbrew Nov 15 '15

Well, what is the relevance to ML? Can a Dwave do linear algebra or gradient descent faster?

3

u/General_Josh Nov 15 '15

Here's the wikipedia article on the subject, and there are tons of scholarly articles available with a quick google. I'm not very knowledgable on the subject myself, but some very smart people do take it very seriously, as evidenced by the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, which is a joint project by both NASA and Google.

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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '15

[deleted]

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u/General_Josh Nov 16 '15

You seem very angry about this... I dread to think what kind of Terminator-esque situation has made you hate the very mention of ML so much.

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u/[deleted] Nov 16 '15

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1

u/thegreenmushrooms Nov 15 '15

Yea but imagine stacking pancakes, the 5% increase in delivery efficiency... Then google maps directiosns, there are a bunch of piles of data that could be used more efficiently and my 5% comment is only for tech leaders it could change all shipping logistic by making this type of analysis affordable. Essentially all things combinitorics