Google is working on developing a quantum computer, announced Google's Hartmut Neven at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009) in Vancouver, Canada last week.
Nevan, who is the comapny's technical lead manager for image recognition gave details of the presentation on the google research blog.
The reason for google's interest in quantum computing is speed. At the size of the internet increases exponentially it is becoming harder and harder for google to maintain the fast speed of the service without having to resort to building massive server farms.
They certainly have the financial resources to explore such research-front area. Companies with money can do that, as we have seen with Bell Labs during the golden days when it has the money and the monopoly.
But hold on. After reading some more of the article, my eyes widened when I read something a bit unsettling.
The company has spent three years working on quantum adiabatic algorithms with a Canadian company D-Wave providing the hardware.
D-Wave's processors work by magnetically coupling superconducting loops called rf-squid flux qubits. "It is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior," says Nevan.
D-Wave, D-Wave, D-Wave... I know that company. They claimed to have made the first "quantum computer", a claim that has yet to be verified (read here, here, and here. Anyone has any new update on them?).
Interesting!
Zz.
No comments:
Post a Comment