Quantum Annealing

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…while keeping your supercool… and harnessing the refractive echoes of many trillions of parallel universes engaged in the computation…

D-Wave’s quantum annealing paper came out in Nature today (here’s a plain English summary).

“Fabricated using standard integrated circuit processes, the processors tested contained 128 superconducting flux qubits and 24,000 devices known as Josephson junctions, making them among the most complex superconducting circuits ever built. Designed to solve optimization and sampling problems, the processors have been successfully used in a variety of tasks including financial risk analysis, bioinformatics, affinity mapping and sentiment analysis, object recognition in images, medical imaging classification and compressed sensing.”

It also makes a wicked machine learning coprocessor, as shown by Google.

Image courtesy of D-Wave. The brilliant monitoring squares are comb-meanders, and the wiring spacing forms a diffraction grating tuned to a specific wavelength of light.

19 responses to “Quantum Annealing”

Broken Toy Shop

May 12, 2011 at 11:14 pm

I understand most of those words, but I don’t understand those words all together.

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Astrocatou

May 13, 2011 at 12:49 am

Sentiment analysis…?
"Captain…that does not compute"…

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solerena

May 13, 2011 at 2:24 am

cool, still not many people heard about it… personally, i started looking for future trends and asking other people question what could be next big thing after Moore’s law a few years ago, found quantum computing and IBM labs, than D-Wave (all before flickr, I did not have any idea who were their investors)… got a stack of papers – all terminology was crazy for somebody who is not that technical but basic concepts one can grasp… tried educating my own family-friends in this regard… did not go too well… kinda people looked confused and thought that I was crazy… maybe I was not that crazy after all:D

would still like to understand… how it is all works with parallel universes involved… and what do they mean by "parallel universes" in this context?
Any cool literature online for dummies?

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liu_yi_feng

May 13, 2011 at 6:01 am

awesome!

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Jeffrey Wallace

May 13, 2011 at 6:06 am

So…the reference to the parallel universes is caused by quantum entanglement and the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics? I have not taken a purely quantum based course in school yet, but have read a bit on it.

This is why i enjoy having you as a contact on flickr. The things you are involved in fascinate me and really gets my gears turning in my head. Thank you for sharing these amazing scientific innovations with us!

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flytrue2

May 13, 2011 at 9:54 am

Extremely interesting and of course gets me excited at a truly primal geek level. Thanks for posting

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Astrocatou

May 13, 2011 at 12:00 pm

web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2011/faster-transistors-physics-05…

just seen…
Connected story ?

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obskura

May 13, 2011 at 2:27 pm

very interesting. Does that mean that all our encryption algorithms are useless now?

Generally encryption works by using functions that are very easy to compute one way (e.g. multiplying two prime numbers) but very hard to reverse (finding the two prime factors of a large number). If quantum computers are good at these combinatorial problems it would potentially make cracking of encryption very easy.

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jurvetson

May 13, 2011 at 5:31 pm

Right – all of the public key encryption methods reply on a mathematical asymmetry, from RSA to elliptic curve, and a general-purpose quantum computer could remove that asymmetry. Yeah, global financial system collapse and all that. In any case, I hope they are gearing up for a flock of black swans in their future…

But, not to worry with D-Wave. They have not built a general purpose quantum computer. It is application-specific to optimization problems, and is not applicable to running Shor’s algorithm to factor integers.

Generalizing a bit about the peculiar implications of quantum computers, I ruminated about quantum computational equivalence a few years back, and now, my gut tells me that while it provides a powerful solver, it does not provide a shortcut in time through all iterative algorithms (specifically, I am thinking about accelerating evolutionary algorithms, which could then generate an AI in short order).

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/34420997@N05] – no, but interesting as well. Will ping them…

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/24157860@N06] – Thanks, and yes, it’s a reference to Oxford Prof. David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality (see two-slit single photon experiments starting around p.40., quotes) on parallel worlds.

If D-Wave’s progress follows what I have called “Rose’s Law” of annually doubling qubits for the next decade (as it has for the past seven years), then a fridge-sized quantum computer in 2020 will handily outperform all computers on the planet, and all computers ever built.… combined (for certain classes of problems, as mentioned above).

P.S. I named the U.S. investment vehicle for this Canadian company: "Parallel Universes, Inc."

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sbove

May 13, 2011 at 7:10 pm

Thanks for this killer view into a very spectacular and rarified slice of emergent reality.
Meanwhile, the other 99.9999% of humanity grovels for scraps of food and clean water. When can we use this chip to "optimize" human socio-political behavior? 😉

ps: are the comb meanders passive monitoring annunciators or parts of an active optical circuit?

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jurvetson

May 13, 2011 at 8:53 pm

They are process control monitor patches. They do funky niobium depositions.

Six nines? =) But I hear you, and worry about a tech-accelerated rich-poor gap and the resurgence of retrograde thought

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Astrocatou

May 14, 2011 at 2:02 am

Yikes…those links are giving me headaches……
Interesting though.

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solerena

May 14, 2011 at 3:34 am

I bought the book… to be or not to be bee is awesome:D

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nhr

May 14, 2011 at 8:43 am

[http://www.flickr.com/photos/44124348109@N01]
> But, not to worry with D-Wave. They have not built a general purpose quantum
> computer. It is application-specific to optimization problems, and is not
> applicable to running Shor’s algorithm to factor integers.

When hearing about the applications of D-Wave’s processor in the machine learning field, the ~~evil~~paranoid me wonders whether it wouldn’t be possible to repurpose it to compute, as an "optimization" / "machine learning" task, a short, say, 128-bit "optimization" vector that could be inserted into an arbitrary data sequence, so that the resulting data sequence’s secure digital hash — e.g. SHA-1 — can be made to match an arbitrary hash value (the machine learning’s target).

This would allow one to generate an arbitrary document whose digital hash collides with — that is, matches — the digital hash of another document.

This indirect, hash collision-based attack could then obviously defeat the security of any architecture based on digital signatures secured by public key cryptography — including X.509 certificates — without requiring a quantum computer designed to run Shor’s factorization algorithm…

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TomiTapio

May 14, 2011 at 10:29 am

Lookin’ all shiny and new.

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Jon Downs

Jun 7, 2011 at 10:15 pm

wonderful photo!

seen in the macronaut pool

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Pieces of Eye

Aug 25, 2011 at 3:34 am

Okay this line has been bouncing around in the back of my head for months: "and harnessing the refractive echoes of many trillions of parallel universes engaged in the computation…" I haven’t put in the time to properly address this but I must. What do you mean by this or more precisely what might I read to understand what you understand?

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jurvetson

Aug 25, 2011 at 3:36 pm

I would suggest Oxford Prof. David Deutsch’s book The Fabric of Reality (see two-slit single photon experiments starting around p.40., quotes) on parallel worlds. He sparked my interest in quantum computing.

"quantum computers can efficiently render every physically possible quantum environment, even when vast numbers of universes are interacting. Quantum computers can also efficiently solve certain mathematical problems, such as factorization, which are classically intractable, and can implement types of cryptography which are classically impossible. Quantum computation is a qualitatively new way of harnessing nature." (p.221)

Or from my first blog on the subject: “Quantum computers have the potential to solve problems that would take a classical computer longer than the age of the universe.”

The book is for the lay reader like me. He also has a collection of technical papers

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jurvetson

Mar 23, 2013 at 6:25 pm

And finally a move from Phys. Rev. B to the business lead in the NYT, and the second-most shared story for the day.

"if it performs as Lockheed and D-Wave expect, the design could be used to supercharge even the most powerful systems, solving some science and business problems millions of times faster than can be done today.

Ray Johnson, Lockheed’s chief technical officer, said his company would use the quantum computer to create and test complex radar, space and aircraft systems. It could be possible, for example, to tell instantly how the millions of lines of software running a network of satellites would react to a solar burst or a pulse from a nuclear explosion — something that can now take weeks, if ever, to determine.

“This is a revolution not unlike the early days of computing,” he said. “It is a transformation in the way computers are thought about.” Many others could find applications for D-Wave’s computers. Cancer researchers see a potential to move rapidly through vast amounts of genetic data. The technology could also be used to determine the behavior of proteins in the human genome, a bigger and tougher problem than sequencing the genome. Researchers at Google have worked with D-Wave on using quantum computers to recognize cars and landmarks, a critical step in managing self-driving vehicles.

Quantum computing has been a goal of researchers for more than three decades, but it has proved remarkably difficult to achieve.

The D-Wave computer that Lockheed has bought uses a different mathematical approach than competing efforts. In the D-Wave system, a quantum computing processor, made from a lattice of tiny superconducting wires, is chilled close to absolute zero. It is then programmed by loading a set of mathematical equations into the lattice.

The processor then moves through a near-infinity of possibilities to determine the lowest energy required to form those relationships. That state, seen as the optimal outcome, is the answer.

The approach, which is known as adiabatic quantum computing, has been shown to have promise in applications like calculating protein folding, and D-Wave’s designers said it could potentially be used to evaluate complicated financial strategies or vast logistics problems."

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Quantum Annealing

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