As Geordie Rose points out, you can’t have a conversation with your laptop. “It’s worth stopping and thinking about why that is,” says the founder and chief technology officer of D-Wave Systems Inc., which sells what it says is the first commercial quantum computer.
Part of the reason is that conversation is nonlinear, so such a feat would require fairly sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI).
“With these types of [quantum] computers, there’s a very clear path toward resolving that problem,” says Dr. Rose in a boardroom at D-Wave’s modest headquarters in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby, B.C. He’s referring to the fact that quantum computing promises to get computers nearer to the kind of complex processing the human brain can do and that AI hasn’t yet been able to replicate. This nascent technology can handle information not just in binary format (zeros or ones) but harness the power of quantum mechanics to deploy zeros and ones at the same time. It has the potential to be millions of times more powerful than today’s supercomputers, solving complex problems in minutes that currently would take years.
“All we need is more hardware,” Dr. Rose says.
In the development lab just across the hall, D-Wave has plenty of hardware on display. One corner of the cluttered space contains four of its supercooled systems, including a new model packaged for sale in a three-metre-tall black box that serves as a shielded room to house the computer.
Too little capability, too big in scale, and too late, IMO. The current D-Wave computers can be compared the cryogenically cooled and very large Cray-2 computer way back in 1985. A 2012 model Apple iPad2 has more processing power than the entire Cray-2 computer had. Quantum computers will need to operate at room temperatures and be microminiaturized to fit into a hand before they will become ubiquitous. But that day is definitely coming. To read more, click here.