John Martinis used the arm of his reading glasses to indicate the spot where he intends to demonstrate an almost unimaginably powerful new form of computer in a few years. It is a cylindrical socket an inch and a half across, at the bottom of a torso-sized stack of plates, blocks, and wires of brass, copper, and gold. The day after I met with him this fall, he loaded the socket with an experimental superconducting chip etched with a microscopic #Google logo and cooled the apparatus to a hundredth of a degree Celsius above absolute zero. To celebrate that first day of testing the machine, Martinis threw what he called “a little party” at a brewpub with colleagues from his newly outfitted Google lab in Santa Barbara, California.
That party was nothing compared with the celebration that will take place if Martinis and his group can actually create the wonder computer they seek. Because it would harness the strange properties of quantum physics that arise in extreme conditions like those on the ultracold chip, the new computer would let a Google coder run calculations in a coffee break that would take a supercomputer of today millions of years. The software that Google has developed on ordinary computers to drive cars or answer questions could become vastly more intelligent. And earlier-stage ideas bubbling up at Google and its parent company, such as robots that can serve as emergency responders or software that can converse at a human level, might become real.
The theoretical underpinnings of quantum computing are well established. And physicists can build the basic units, known as qubits, out of which a quantum computer would be made. They can even operate qubits together in small groups. But they have not made a fully working, practical quantum computer.
Martinis is a towering figure in the field: his research group at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has demonstrated some of the most reliable qubits around and gotten them running some of the code a quantum computer would need to function. He was hired by Google in June 2014 after persuading the company that his team’s technology could mature rapidly with the right support. With his new Google lab up and running, Martinis guesses that he can demonstrate a small but useful quantum computer in two or three years. “We often say to each other that we’re in the process of giving birth to the quantum computer industry,” he says.
Google and quantum computing are a match made in algorithmic heaven. The company is often said to be defined by an insatiable hunger for data. But Google has a more pressing strategic addiction: to technology that extracts information from data, and even creates intelligence from it. The company was founded to commercialize an algorithm for ranking Web pages, and it built its financial foundations with systems that sell and target ads. More recently, Google has invested heavily in the development of AI software that can learn to understand language or images, perform basic reasoning, or steer a car through traffic—all things that remain tricky for conventional computers but should be a breeze for quantum ones. “Machine learning is a core, transformative way by which we’re rethinking how we’re doing everything,” Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, recently informed investors. Supporting that effort would be the first of many jobs for Martinis’s new quantum industry.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/544421/googles-quantum-dream-machine/
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