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Quantum Computer Learns To 'See' Trees (sciencemag.org)
sciencehabit writes from a report via Science Magazine: Scientists have trained a quantum computer to recognize trees. That may not seem like a big deal, but the result means that researchers are a step closer to using such computers for complicated machine learning problems like pattern recognition and computer vision. The team fed hundreds of NASA satellite images of California into a D-Wave 2X processor, and asked the computer to consider dozens of features -- hue, saturation, even light reflectance -- to determine whether clumps of pixels were trees as opposed to roads, buildings, or rivers. They then told the computer whether its classifications were right or wrong so that the computer could learn from its mistakes, tweaking the formula it uses to determine whether something is a tree. After it was trained, the D-Wave was 90% accurate in recognizing trees in aerial photographs of Mill Valley, California. The results demonstrate how scientists can program quantum computers to 'look' at and analyze images, and opens up the possibility of using them to solve other complex problems that require heavy data crunching.
this is treemendous!
Can it recognize different types of trees from quite a long way away, or will it just identify everything as a Larch?
see the forest. What with all the trees and all...
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The 2X DWave machine does quantum annealing. This is good in the sense that it doesn't come remotely close to the kind of machine that maintains coherence across hundreds of bits that can mess up public key crypto. It managed 5 qbits for 20us if read the paper right.
The paper proudly points out it managed 9% error compared to 10.5% error rate of a classical computer doing simulated annealing. However this is not better than classical computer running a better distinguisher. Classical computers are not constrained to run only simulated annealing.
We have yet to reach the point where any quantum computer is faster than a classical computer at any task. This is a good thing. No one has really put anything in place to protect the cryptography of commerce from a hypothetical but largely impossible quantum computer running Shor's algorithm or Grover's algorithm. New hope, RWLE, hash based signatures etc are still the domain of IACR papers. You bank will not be using them any time soon. Lattice crypto just keep getting broken.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
Could save a lot of replacement hardware.
They trained it to identify green pixels? How groundbreaking.
Positronic brain in Asimov's novel!
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Looking at the pictures, they seem to have take a region covered in trees and filtered for dark green. Grass is light green and solid, land is sandy brown in that region, and trees in aeriel photos are dark uneven green. i.e. a simple chromakey would do that and better than 90% success.
The 'Quantum accelerated' bit is just fluff, you can do that with a single layer neural network, without going deeper.
..the answer to the most important question in quantum uncertainty: "if a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"
Watch out for that tree!
The Larch
90% accuracy. Please do not release the tree-felling robots just yet.
90% sounds good, but that's also a 10% failure rate. Ewwwwwwwwww, not good.
It's a good start but I wouldn't trust anything that's wrong 10% of the time. When it gets to 99.999999999%, then I'd trust it.
I agree, detecting trees may not be a life or death problem, but then again it might if you're landing a plane or something similar. But it's a good start and will probably only get better.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
This will force CS programs to reevaluate how they teach about tree structures. Why traverse a tree when you can look at it?
While interesting, the obvious thing they seem to be leaving out is the performance comparison to a regular processor of similar complexity. I'm not trying to pit a 1152 qubit machines against one with trillions of transistors, it would just be nice to have some semblance of a comparison for the reader.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
hue
It's not racial profiling when the quantum computer says YOU'RE A TERRORIST.
Or dead pixels. There's work to be done.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
A friend was doing image processing work in the late 80s and managed to get some funding for image recognition test. The idea was an alarm camera could detect the family pet and ignore it but detect bad people and set off the alarm. The system was trained using photos of dogs. The end result was a program that could identify pictures of dogs. It was hopeless at detecting real dogs, but it was spot on about detecting pictures of dogs.
Bored pissed off Quantum computer gets it wrong 10% of the time to baffle the programmers.
Many have met their maker through a tree. Now, if you do Horizon3, many trees are yours for the taking. A few aren't. Do you still want to play?
My concern? People outside cars are not accessible to my drink+smoke+inject driving.
This story would be a whole lot more meaningful if, for example, the resulting 90% performance of these quantum chips is any way could be contrasted with ANY frame of reference to reality. Whats the point of reporting test results as compared to ...what? What the hell does it mean?... that every not quantum computer can't perform at all? If I am supposed to care about these results compared to nothing at all then I'm in grave doubt as to the value of this technology in the hands of those who can't distinguish it from an iPhone app's performance. I'm pretty sure it can recognize a tree too. Quantum weakness in rhetorical value. Wake up the other hemisphere on this half baked argument so that nerd news can matter to the rest of the human race.
The article should have been "from the but-can't-see-the-forest dept".
"How to recognize trees from quite a long way away". A bit dated, but still unmatched: https://youtu.be/Tzmp8T2xX2A?t...
Signature deleted by lameness filter.
I had a Quantum Bigfoot hard drive 20 years ago already.
we can use quantum computers to solve google captchas
I'd actually be disappointed if we weren't investigating or using this type of technology for target identification in military applications.
Be useful to send a drone, and run a report on position, heading, number, type, and groupings of vehicles and personnel.
Well, you might think so. But it's not always as easy as all that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Does dead from the neck up count?
Because there are a lot of pictures of Donald Trump that could be used to train an image recognition system to do that.
And by "we", you mean, "some people", because there are (and probably always will be) a whole bunch of us out here who just laugh when some committee tries to claim that Pluto isn't a planet.
Planet is an arbitrary descriptor. Pre- or post-committee. I'll keep my descriptor; they can keep theirs.
FWIW (which is something to me, and likely nothing to anyone else) this is the heart of my descriptor:
If it primarily orbits a star, and has characteristics such that the main mass has formed a spheroid and it will remain that way barring impact with something or being subject to radiation above the melting point of its solids, it's a planet. If a natural object orbits a star but will not form a sphere on its own, it's a comet or asteroid, depending on behavior (ablative or not, respectively.) If it primarily orbits a planet, it's a moon, regardless of other characteristics. If it is not orbiting a planet or a star, it is a free object; e.g. a free planet, a free asteroid, a free comet. If it is undergoing fusion, it is a star; if the fusion fire was lit, but is now out, we have a dead star, the rest of the usual classifications for the various types of stars apply as per usual. If the components of a moon, planet, asteroid, comet, star, habitat or device were assembled by an intelligence, then the prefix "artificial" applies; if an artificial object is orbiting a moon or a planet or an asteroid or a comet, then the prefix "satellite" also applies. I don't use "satellite" as a synonym for natural objects.
So as I see it, Pluto is, was, and likely always will be a planet.
If I were involved in one or more of the astro sciences, I'd probably feel more constrained with regard to whatever is the formal definition of the specific scientific domain. But I am not. So I don't. :)
When people say Pluto is [other than a planet], my mind just translates that to "is a planet." Kind of like when most people say "government", my mind translates that directly into "organized crime."
Because the most useful concepts describe what you're looking at in such a way as you get an accurate perception of what they are. The current non-planet trend for Pluto doesn't do that for me.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
If the picture was taken in fall or winter when you have multi colored or no leaves, does it still work?
You can observe the trees. Great! Now.. Can you avoid them?
I thought in quantum computing a tree could be a tree or not, or both a tree AND not a tree. So how can we be sure what it's telling us?
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.