IBM Is Now Letting Anyone Play With Its Quantum Computer
I
IBM Is Now Letting Anyone Play With Its
Quantum Computer
Author: Cade Metz.Cade Metz Business
WIRED | 2016-05-04
Quantum computing is computing at its most
esoteric. It’s an experimental, enormously complex, sometimes downright
confusing technology that’s typically the domain of hardcore academics
and organizations like Google and NASA. But that might be changing.
Today, IBM unveiled an online service that
lets anyone use the five-qubit quantum computer its researchers have
erected at a research lab in Yorktown Heights, New York. You can access
the machine over the Internet via a simple software interface—or at
least it’s simple if you understand the basics of quantum computing.
This new service is hardly something the everyday consumer will use, but
it’s a big deal for the many researchers now working to build a
practical quantum computer—a computer that moves beyond just 1s and 0s
to become exponentially more powerful than today’s machines. In that
sense, IBM is indeed striving to bring quantum computing to the world at
large.
'I think that someone out there will learn
things about the behavior of this quantum computer that its developers
never thought of.'
Yes, the service is a way for IBM to show off
its quantum computer, to have outsiders verify and approve its work—something
that’s particularly important when you’re dealing with the hard-to-pin-down
dynamics of quantum systems. But David DiVincenzo, a professor at the
Institute for Quantum Information at RWTH Aachen University and one of
quantum computing’s earliest pioneers, believes the service will lead to
more. “I think that someone out there will learn things about the
behavior of this quantum computer,” he says, “that its developers never
thought of.”
That’s an important thing as researchers seek
to unlock new realms of technology with this kind of machine, including
everything from understanding DNA sequences to predicting the rise and
fall of the stock market. Some aim to simulate the way individual
molecules interact, while others hope that quantum computers will extend
the reach of machine learning. That’s what Google and NASA are exploring
with their $10 million D-Wave machine, a somewhat controversial creation
that exhibits quantum properties in at least some situations.
Meet the Qubit
Today’s computers store data in extremely
small transistors. Each transistor can hold a single “bit” of
information: a 1 or a 0. But about thirty years ago, scientists proposed
a machine that could go beyond that binary, a machine that could store
data in a system that obeys the seemingly magical principles of quantum
mechanics. Instead of just a 1 or a 0, a “qubit” could store both at the
same time, thanks to what’s called the superposition principle.
By extension, two qubits could hold four
values simultaneously: 00, 01, 10, and 11. And if you keep adding qubits,
you could, in theory, build a machine far more powerful than any that
exists today. “These are things you can’t explain with regular logic,”
says Jerry Chow, the former Yale researcher who helps oversee IBM’s
quantum computing work. “Quantum computing and quantum algorithms are
all about: how do you harness that?”
But that kind of ultra-powerful machine
doesn’t yet exist. Qubits, you see, are slippery things. If you try to
observe the state of a quantum system, it “decoheres,” falling into one
state or the other. It no longer holds both a 0 and a 1. It holds only a
O or a 1, like the classical computers of today. To build a true quantum
computer, researchers must harness the probability that a qubit will
decohere into one state versus the other.
The Same Result Each Time
There are many ways of doing this, and though
none has truly cracked the problem, some are quite promising. IBM has
built a quantum computer that operates by dropping superconducting
circuits into an enormous sub-zero refrigerator, and it spans five
qubits. But now, in sharing this machine with the world at large, the
company hopes to accelerate its progress, aiming to extend its power to
50 or possibly 100 qubits.
These are things you can't explain with
regular logic. Jerry Chow, IBM
According to David Cory, a professor with the
University of Waterloo’s Institute for Quantum Computing, this sort of
online quantum computer—a quantum cloud service, if you will—is pretty
much unprecedented. Building such a service, he explains, is far more
difficult than you might expect. “It’s not a simple thing to do,” he
says. “Quantum systems are really quite delicate.”
And, he adds, IBM has done it right. The
service is fronted by an interface that’s remarkably easy to use. “Any
student that has a first introduction to quantum computing would
understand how to interact with this device,” Cory says.
Cory spent
the weekend using the new service, and what struck him was that the
system was so consistent—that it reached the pretty much same result
each time he ran a test. That’s not a big deal in the world of classical
computing. Your laptop does that countless times a second. But in the
world of quantum computing, which is all about capturing probabilities,
consistency is a sign of progress. Now, with this service available to
the larger community, perhaps more progress is on the way.
read:http://www.wired.com/2016/05/ibm-letting-anyone-play-quantum-computer/