Google’s new quantum computer is '100 million times faster than your PC

Google’s Quantum Computer – 100 Million Times Faster

Google together with NASA has been working on a lightning fast quantum computer which seems to be 3,600 times quicker than a super computer in solving difficult problems. The artificial intelligence lab of the technology company is of the belief that they may eventually have proof that their opinion dividing quantum computer would actually work.

 Google and NASA have announced that they would be collaborating on the D-Wave X2 quantum computer which according to them is 100 million times faster than a conventional computer chip in 2013. It has the capabilities of answering certain systems in second instead of years. Google’s interest in D-Wave machine which has also been invested in by IBM as well as Microsoft is due to the large power quantum computers that could potentially unlock.

 The weirdness of the so called quantum mechanics, where the basic laws of physics tend to break down, has the capabilities of solving long standing issues in machine intelligence and materials science. On the part of NASA, the computers could support schedule rocket launches or even produce complex simulation of space missions.

Quantum Monte Carlo

Hartmut Neven, Google director of engineering had commented that for a specific carefully crafted proof of concept problem, they had achieved a 100 million fold speed up. He had also added in a blog post that they had found that for problem instances involving almost 1,000 binary variables, quantum annealing significantly beats its classical counterpart, simulated strengthening and is more than 108 times faster than simulated annealing running on a single core.

The quantum hardware to another algorithm known as Quantum Monte Carlo was also compared. This method had been designed to match the behaviour of quantum systems though it tends to run on conventional processors. While scaling with size between two methods was comparable they were again separated by a large element at times as high as 108.

The computer figures out the most efficient overall course of action in completing a task and a set of number of options has been provided and could be key to the innovation of next generation artificial intelligence according to Engadget.

Disruptive Technology

Cynics have questioned whether the computer actually taps into quantum physics to resolve procedures, though Google and NASA informs that they have proof. The director of exploration technology at NASA’s Ames research centre in California, Deepak Biswas, has commented that `it is a disruptive technology which could alter how we tend to do everything.

Quantum computing depends on quantum bits or qubits and unlike the traditional computers wherein the bits should have a value of zero or one, a qubit could represent a zero, a one or even both the values at the same time.

Signifying information in qubits enables to process the information in ways which have no equivalent with regards to classical computing, taking advantage of the occurrences like quantum tunnelling together with quantum entanglement. Quantum computers may theoretically be capable of solving certain issues within a few days which on a classical computer would take millions of years.