Posted on 12/11/2015 8:48:12 AM PST by SeekAndFind
This week, Google announced a breakthrough that could prove its quantum computer is actually using quantum mechanics.
When researchers gave the D-Wave 2X a carefully crafted test problem, the 1,000-qubit computer solved it 100,000,000 times faster than a classical computer could.
Quite a few tech giants and government organizations are investing in quantum computing. And many of them, including Google, NASA, and Lockheed Martin, are working with the commercial quantum computers built by D-Wave.
The idea is that these devices can harness the counterintuitive effects of quantum mechanics to solve problems faster than conventional computers, which could potentially improve artificial intelligence, materials science, space exploration, and even Google web searches.
(Skeptics, however, have suggested these practical applications are far-fetched and that quantum computing would most likely be applied to a less glamorous business: proving the theories of quantum mechanics.)
No matter how we plan to use quantum computers, we have to jump a big hurdle first: proving that a computer is actually using quantum mechanics to solve a problem. One sign of QC in action is quantum speedup—and that's just what a team of Google researchers has discovered [disclosure: one of the researchers is friends with this author]. In their paper, released on the arXiv pre-print server, they designed a problem that a real quantum machine should be able to solve more effectively than a classical one. Then they posed this problem both to their D-Wave 2X and to a classical single-core computer.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
If you think it, it disappears.
Landru, you are not of the body. Will you be joining festival?
if they’ve actually done it, then they’ve killed the internet as a business medium
Or it could decide it doesn’t want to...
Yeah, and they’ll be in wristwatches in 2 years.
BFL
They compared it against a single-core processor that is emulating a quantum computer, vs. running natively. And not multi-core, which is how current computing technology has increased its capability in recent years vs. bump up clock speeds? Hardly fair in either case, in terms of comparing hardware capabilities at least.
And as always, computer hardware doesn't "solve problems" or inherently add intelligence on its own. That requires software. So even super fast quantum computers of the future will be just as seriously limited by software technology as they are now. Yeah, they'll run the same software encoded algorithms much faster, but there's nothing that's inherently more "intelligent" about that.
The one thing this technology will do is be much more tolerant of bloated and inefficient software, multiple layers to build up to writing software at higher levels of abstraction, etc. Those are all positives of a sort. But again, smarter and more "intelligent" claims are all about the software and how well it scales, not the hardware, even though there are other big advantages associated with major leaps in hardware technology like this.
Does this mean we get an answer before we ask the question?
...
That depends on which universe you are in.
It’s too bad that the Computer still isn’t as smart as Obama. /s
“Whether it exists or not depends on whether you look at it.
It can solve the problem. But if it tells you the answer, it’ll be wrong.
People were warned of the 0bama Holocaust in 2008 - it didn’t make any difference.
If it can handle HTML remains to be seen. All of that crud has evolved beyond the intellect of the worldwide support staff.
That is true but maybe if they can see it first hand like in videos or something
I bet it crowbars on a common core question.
Unless you look at it.
Instead of coming he went?
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