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Google To Build Quantum Information Processors
An anonymous reader writes The Google Quantum AI Team has announced that they're bringing in a team from the University of California at Santa Barbara to build quantum information processors within the company. "With an integrated hardware group the Quantum AI team will now be able to implement and test new designs for quantum optimization and inference processors based on recent theoretical insights as well as our learnings from the D-Wave quantum annealing architecture." Google will continue to work with D-Wave, but the UC Santa Barbara group brings its own areas of expertise with superconducting qubit arrays.
...and now are developing their own version based on their 'learnings'.
It will be nice to see if Google's interests and motivations will yield interesting, more practical results, in this area.
"Google Quantum AI Team" sounds less like a job title and more like a section of the datacenter with atypically touchy cooling needs...
Now we are proper fucked.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
The D-Wave unit really doesn't help them. Perhaps a dedicated QUBO solver isn't sufficient for their needs or the D-Wave doesn't look like it will scale (we already know that it can be outperformed by equipment much less expensive than itself but investing might still be worthwhile if the technology looks like it will scale over time).
Now there's a business card I want to have....
They originally wanted to call it the Google Quantum A Team, but they were warned off that name after receiving an anonymous email that was liberally sprinkled with the word "fools" and signed with the moniker "Mr T"
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
That summary reads like something out of Star Trek. Superconducting qubit arrays! Imagine a positronic network of those. ;-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
In other words, they are stupid. Not a surprise, but the cost is petty cash for them.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
even a failed attempt is worth quite a bit, and worth watching; as far as technological research goes, we usually tend to fuck it up a few dozen times before we get it just right.
In the meantime, they seem to be doing good business. There is a sucker born every minute...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Good troll. I was really, really tempted to give you a "Funny" mod. Here's some kudos instead.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
http://www.googletechinfo.com/...
Well there's really two different problems. One is the hardware, the other is the algorithms. Currently, if we had quantum processors there's only a few things it could do better than conventional hardware. Prime number factorization is the leading light in that, This doesn't describe much of what computers currently do, so currently a real quantum processor wouldn't be really useful except for things like "Quantu Key Exchange", code breaking, etc. But there *ought* to be a large number of things it could do, if we could only figure out how.
Because of this, only certain groups are really interested in developing quantum processors. (Expected cooling requirements makes things worse.) But if a few more algorithms could be developed it's likely that EVERY datacenter would want to have at least one to use as a server. Maybe.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I've had dozens of individuals stay with me for a while, either in my spare bedroom or on my couch. A couple of my friends do the same. When someone is "down on their luck", just got out of prison, sobering up, whatever we get a call. My experience and my observation of others is that we can do a lot of good if we say to the person "I see you're down in a hole. I've been there, let me show you the way out." We show them how to get a job, right away, even with a felony record. We show them how to rent a place to stay without having money saved for the deposits , including utility deposits.
On the other hand, if we try to carry them of the hole instead of showing them the way out, it virtually always fails. Feeding them today means that in a few hours they'll be hungry again. It ensures their situation doesn't improve. What improves their situation is to say "come with me and I'll show you how we can earn somemoney today so you cqn buy groceries ". That gives them the skill, the mechanics of how to go earn money whenever you need to, but more importantly it gives them a new pattern "when you're running low on groceries, go do some work to earn some" rather than "when you're low on groceries, call someone and ask if they'll buy you groceries ". These are the facts from our experience.
> Now, if your motivation is to make them dependent on you, that is a different issue. However, there is no evidence to support that is Bill Gate's intention with his philanthropy.
Newton's third law says that for every action, there is an equal reaction. Motivation and intent are not part of the formula. If you do X, Y will happen. It doesn't matter a bit what you're thinking about when you do X. You intentions affect how you FEEL, that's it. Other people are affected by your ACTIONS. If you set up a situation where they are in a dependent role, they'll be practicing dependence. Wishing that weren't true doesn't enter into it at all.
That's unfortunate for U.S. liberals because they have a lot of GREAT intentions. They really, really want to save the planet by driving 35 miles to buy soy and hemp at the organic market. Unfortunately, their actions, driving 35 miles, just burned a gallon and half of gas each way. Their intentions are so right, so pure. It's just that their actions are normally all wrong.
What does that even mean? Do you mean that it outperforms classical machines in certain cases? or are you just being funny?
I am not arguing that teaching them to be self sufficient may not be the better choice, but both methods are still "helping." Sometimes self-sufficiency is beyond the realm give the nature of the person and the circumstances. For instance, providing direct help for to the victims of the Ebola outbreak is more useful than teaching them how to create their own treatment. Even if they had their own ability to create their own treatments, there are opportunity costs. Would developing these treatments in the sense of being self-sufficient outweigh the same effort being put into crop production?
While helping others to become self-sufficient, sometimes those to whom much have been given are called upon to help those without. Conceptually, teaching a man to fish is better than feeding him for a day, but sometimes one's excesses can relieve a lot of pain and suffering until that new skill is mastered.
People have already forgotten that the high-temperature superconductors were discovered, not by the power industry, but by IBM.
I'm not faulting them, just saying that while everybody screws up in different ways, the liberal tendency toward being idealistic and focusing on motives means their particular downfall is that they tend to want very badly to achieve the impossible, without making much actual progress. As an example, pollution from power plants (and fatal illnesses caused by them) could have been reduced over 90% by switching from coal to nuclear. Liberals refused that option, choosing instead to,wish that the sun shone at night in order to provide solar-electric.
Conservatives, almost by definition, screw up by being so afraid of throwing the baby out with the bathwater that they keep the stinky old bathwater for far too long. Different ways of thinking create different problems, that's all. Probably the ideal situation would be for the liberals to set the goals, then turn it over to the conservatives to implement effective action to move toward those goals.
Oh, Hell Yea! However, it will take time for the average computer user unable to handle current system with watercooling needs... My guess is that anything current does need super cooling as in liquid Nitro cold... So the likely scenario of a broadly deployable technology is probably a very long time away... for those wondering why? Read this: http://www.academia.edu/240382...