Category Archives: Quantum Computing

Accenture has partnered with quantum software startup 1QBit to develop a quantum-enabled molecular comparison application for US multinational biotechnology firm Biogen.

The application is expected to improve advanced molecular design to speed up drug discovery for complex neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimer's, and Parkinson's.

Researchers at Accenture Labs worked with 1QBit to create the new application, which enhances Biogen's existing molecule comparison method through quantum computing.

Molecular comparison is a crucial part of early-phase drug design and discovery, Accenture explained, and involves intensive computational methods to review molecule matches and predict the positive effects of a therapy or drug while reducing negative side effects.

As quantum computing has the potential to find the answer to complex problems millions of times faster than classical computing by leveraging the properties of quantum physics, Accenture said the new application provides insights into the molecular comparison process as well as much deeper contextual information about how, where, and why molecules match.

This is expected to enable scientists and researchers to analyse large collections of molecules more quickly and cost effectively.

"At Biogen, we're always looking to harness cutting-edge technologies that push the boundaries of traditional pharmaceutical research to discover new treatments and cures for complex neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative conditions," Govinda Bhisetti, head of Computational Chemistry at Biogen, said.

"Collaborating with researchers at Accenture Labs and 1QBit made it possible to rapidly pilot and deploy a quantum-enabled application that has the potential to enable us to bring medicines to people faster."

Accenture Labs said it has identified more than 150 use cases with clients where quantum computing would be relevant, and is working with clients across multiple industries to prepare for the arrival of mainstream quantum computing.

Also on Friday, Accenture expanded its partnership with SAP to include working with SAP Leonardo, the ERP giant's digital innovation system that combines differentiating software capabilities in machine learning, the Internet of Things (IoT), big data, analytics, and blockchain on its SAP Cloud Platform.

Accenture will be integrating more than 50 of its enterprise analytics applications with SAP Leonardo, spanning finance and accounting, supply chain, procurement, human capital management, and sales and customer service.

"Today, we're at an incredible tipping point," said Pierre Nanterme, Accenture chairman and CEO. "We're face to face with an era of tremendous business transformation where the fundamental rules of how we create value are being rewritten. What we're announcing today is a bold step in defining the rules for the intelligent enterprise."

The companies first began working together 18 months ago on SAP S/4HANA, aiming to simplify and fast-track the "digital journeys" of its clients. SAP and Accenture had partnered back in 2010 for Business ByDesign and in 2014 expanded their global alliance through an agreement to offer cloud-based offerings designed for industry-specific and technology-enabled operations.

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Accenture, 1QBit partner for drug discovery through quantum computing - ZDNet

Accentureand quantum software firm1QBitcollaborated with Biogen to develop a first-of-its-kindquantum-enabled molecular comparison applicationthat could significantly improve advanced molecular design to speed up drug discovery for complex neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, Alzheimers, Parkinsons and Lou Gehrigs Disease.

Researchers atAccenture Labscollaborated with 1QBit to create the new application which enhances Biogens existing molecule comparison method with quantum capabilities. Molecular comparison is a crucial part of early-phase drug design and discovery, and involves intensive computational methods to review molecule matches and predict the positive effects of a therapy or drug while reducing negative side effects.

By leveraging quantum computing a computing paradigm that has the potential to find the answer to complex business problems millions of times faster than classical computing by leveraging the properties of quantum physics the new application provides novel insights into the molecular comparison process as well as much deeper contextual information about how, where and why molecules match. This is expected to enable scientists and researchers to analyze large collections of molecules more quickly and cost effectively.

At Biogen, were always looking to harness cutting-edge technologies that push the boundaries of traditional pharmaceutical research to discover new treatments and cures for complex neuroinflammatory and neurodegenerative conditions, said Govinda Bhisetti, Head of Computational Chemistry, Biogen. Collaborating with researchers at Accenture Labs and 1QBit made it possible to rapidly pilot and deploy a quantum-enabled application that has the potential to enable us to bring medicines to people faster.

In just over two months, Accenture Labs, Biogen and 1QBit progressed from an exploratory conversation about quantum business experimentation to an enterprise-ready, quantum-enabled application that generates molecular comparison results with deeper insights about shared traits. As quantum computers become more readily available, it will become easier for pharmaceutical companies to identify and develop new medicines for a wide range of diseases and conditions, saidJeff Elton, Ph.D., managing director, Accenture Strategy, Life Sciences.

Accenture Labs is focused on helping clients across multiple industries prepare for the arrival of mainstream quantum computing, which offers great potential to solve challenges in entirely new ways through quantum-enabled optimization, sampling, and machine learning algorithms, said Marc Carrel-Billiard, senior managing director, Accenture Labs. Through our collaboration with Biogen, 1QBit and our colleagues in the AccentureLife Sciences industry group, we have achieved a breakthrough that confirms the speed and accuracy of the quantum-enabled method for molecular comparison and takes another significant step toward improving the pharmaceutical industrys drug discovery and design process to help deliver better patient and economic outcomes more efficiently.

According to theAccenture Technology Vision 2017companion survey of more than 5,400 business and IT executives, 40 percent of respondents are taking proactive steps to prepare for quantum computing, with 36 percent planning to invest in quantum capabilities in the next two years.

Playing a key role in Accentures overallInnovation Architecture, Accenture Labs helps clients harness emerging technologies to change the way the world works and lives. Given the potential for quantum computing to disrupt the computing landscape in the next two to five years, helping clients identify opportunities and begin working with quantum computing to stay ahead of the broader introduction and deployment of associated technologies is a key focus area. Accenture Labs has already identified more than 150 use cases with clients from portfolio optimization in the financial services sector to production scheduling in manufacturing where quantum computing would be relevant.

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Consortium Applies Quantum Computing to Drug Discovery for Neurological Diseases - Drug Discovery & Development

Quantum computing just around the corner: D-Wave Systems processor.

It's a sunny Tuesday morning in late March at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Centre. The corridor from the reception area follows the long, curving glass curtain-wall that looks out over the visitors' parking lot to leafless trees covering a distant hill in Yorktown Heights, an hour north of Manhattan.

Walk past the podium from the Jeopardy! episodes at which IBM's Watson smote the human champion of the TV quiz show, turn right into a hallway, and you'll enter a windowless lab where a quantum computer is chirping away.

Actually, "chirp" isn't quite the right word. It's a somewhat metallic sound, chush, chush, chush, that's made by the equipment that lowers the temperature inside a so-called dilution refrigerator to within hailing distance of absolute zero. Encapsulated in a white canister suspended from a frame, the dilution refrigerator cools a superconducting chip studded with a handful of quantum bits, or qubits.

Quantum computing has been around, in theory if not in practice, for several decades. But these new types of machines, designed to harness quantum mechanics and potentially process unimaginable amounts of data, are certifiably a big deal.

"I would argue that a working quantum computer is perhaps the most sophisticated technology that humans have ever built," says Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive of Rigetti Computing, a start-up in Berkeley, California. Quantum computers, he says, harness nature at a level we became aware of only about 100 years ago and one that isn't apparent to us in everyday life.

What's more, the potential of quantum computing is enormous. Tapping into the weird way nature works could potentially speed up computing so some problems that are now intractable to classical computers could finally yield solutions. And maybe not just for chemistry and materials science. With practical breakthroughs in speed on the horizon, Wall Street's antennae are twitching.

The second investment that CME Group's venture arm ever made was in 1QB Information Technologies, a quantum-computing software company in Vancouver.

"From the start at CME Ventures, we've been looking further ahead at transformational innovations and technologies that we think could have an impact on the financial-services industry in the future," says Rumi Morales, head of CME Venture.

That 1QBit financing round, in 2015, was led by Royal Bank of Scotland. Kevin Hanley, RBS's director of innovation, says quantum computing is likely to have the biggest impact on industries that are data-rich and time-sensitive.

"We think financial services is kind of in the cross hairs of that profile," he says.

Goldman Sachs Groupis an investor in D-Wave Systems, another quantum player, as is In-Q-Tel, the CIA-backed venture capital company, says Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave. The company makes machines that do something called quantum annealing.

"Quantum annealing is basically using the quantum computer to solve optimisation problems at the lowest level," Brownell says. "We've taken a slightly different approach where we're actually trying to engage with customers, make our computers more and more powerful, and provide this advantage to them in the form of a programmable, usable computer."

Marcos Lpez de Prado, a senior managing director at Guggenheim Partners,who's also a scientific adviser at 1QBit and a research fellow at the USDepartment of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says it's all about context.

"The reason quantum computing is so exciting is its perfect marriage with machine learning," he says. "I would go as far as to say that currently this is the main application for quantum computing."

Part of that simply derives from the idea of a quantum computer: harnessing a physical device to find an answer, Lpez de Prado says.

He sometimes explains it by pointing to the video game Angry Birds. When you play it on your iPad, the central processing units use some mathematical equations that have been programmed into a library to simulate the effects of gravity and the interaction of objects bouncing and colliding. "This is how digital computers work," he says.

By contrast, quantum computers turn that approach on its head, Lpez de Prado says. The paradigm for quantum computers is this: Let's throw some birds and see what happens. Encode into the quantum microchip this problem: These are your birds and where you throw them from, so what's the optimal trajectory?

"Then you let the computer check all possible solutions essentially or a very large combination of them and come back with an answer," he says.

In a quantum computer, there's no mathematician cracking the problem, he says. "The laws of physics crack the problem for you."

The fundamental building blocks of our world are quantum mechanical. "If you look at a molecule," says Dario Gil, vice-president for science and solutions at IBM Research, "the reason molecules form and are stable is because of the interactions of these electron orbitals. Each calculation in there each orbital is a quantum mechanical calculation."

The number of those calculations, in turn, increases exponentially with the number of electrons you're trying to model. By the time you have 50 electrons, you have 2 to the 50th power calculations, Gil says.

"That's a phenomenally large number, so we can't compute it today," he says. (For the record, it's 1.125 quadrillion. So if you fired up your laptop and started cranking through several calculations a second, it would take a few million years to run through them all.)

Connecting information theory to physics could provide a path to solving such problems, Gil says. A 50-qubit quantum computer might begin to be able to do it.

Landon Downs, president and co-founder of 1QBit, says it's now becoming possible to unlock the computational power of the quantum world.

"This has huge implications for producing new materials or creating new drugs, because we can actually move from a paradigm of discovery to a new era of quantum design," he says in an email. Rigetti, whose company is building hybrid quantum-classical machines, says one moonshot use of quantum computing could be to model catalysts that remove carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphere-and thereby help fix global warming. (Bloomberg Beta, a venture capital unit of Bloomberg, is an investor in Rigetti Computing.)

The quantum-computing community hums with activity and excitement these days. Teams around the world at start-ups, corporations, universitiesand government labs are racing to build machines using a welter of different approaches to process quantum information.

Superconducting qubit chips too elementary for you? How about trapped ions, which have brought together researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology? Or maybe the topological approach that Microsoftis developing through an international effort called Station Q? The aim is to harness a particle called a non-abelian anyon which has not yet been definitively proven to exist.

These are early days, to be sure. As of late May, the number of quantum computers in the world that clearly, unequivocally do something faster or better than a classical computer remains zero, according to Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science and director of the Quantum Information Centre at the University of Texas at Austin. Such a signal event would establish "quantum supremacy". In Aaronson's words: "That we don't have yet."

Yet someone may accomplish the feat as soon as this year. Most insiders say one clear favourite is a group at Googleled by John Martinis, a physics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. According to Martinis, the group's goal is to achieve supremacy with a 49-qubit chip. As of late May, he says, the team was testing a 22-qubit processor as an intermediate step toward a showdown with a classical supercomputer.

"We are optimistic about this, since prior chips have worked well," he said in an email.

The idea of using quantum mechanics to process information dates back decades. One key event happened in 1981, when International Business Machines. and MIT co-sponsored a conference on the physics of computation at the university's Endicott House. At the conference, Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, proposed building a quantum computer.

"Nature isn't classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you'd better make it quantum mechanical," he said in his talk. "And by golly, it's a wonderful problem, because it doesn't look so easy."

He got that part right. The basic idea is to take advantage of a couple of the weird properties of the atomic realm: superposition and entanglement. Superposition is the mind-bending observation that a particle can be in two states at the same time. Bring out your ruler to get a measurement, however, and the particle will collapse into one state or the other. And you won't know which until you try, except in terms of probabilities. This effect is what underlies Schrodinger's cat, the thought experiment animal that's both alive and dead in a box until you sneak a peek.

Sure, bending your brain around that one doesn't come especially easy; nothing in everyday life works that way, of course. Yet about 1 million experiments since the early 20th century show that superposition is a thing. And if superposition happens to be your thing, the next step is figuring out how to strap such a crazy concept into a harness.

Enter qubits. Classical bits can be a 0 or a 1; run a string of them together through "logic gates" (AND, OR, NOT, etc.), and you'll multiply numbers, draw an image, and whatnot. A qubit, by contrast, can be a 0, a 1, or both at the same time, says IBM's Gil.

Ready for entanglement? (You're in good company if you balk; Albert Einstein famously rebelled against the idea, calling it "spooky action at a distance".) Well, let's say two qubits were to get entangled; Gil says that would make them perfectly correlated. A quantum computer could then utilise a menagerie of distinctive logic gates. The so-called Hadamard gate, for example, puts a qubit into a state of perfect superposition. (There may be something called a "square root of NOT" gate, but let's take a pass on that one.) If you tap the superposition and entanglement in clever arrangements of the weird quantum gates, you start to get at the potential power of quantum computing.

If you have two qubits, you can explore four states: 00, 01, 10, and 11. (Note that that's 4: 2 raised to the power 2.) "When I perform a logical operation on my quantum computer, I can operate on all of this at once," Gil says. And the number of states you can look at is 2 raised to the power of the number of qubits. So if you could make a 50-qubit universal quantum computer, you could in theory explore all of those 1.125 quadrillion states-at the same time.

What gives quantum computing its special advantage, says Aaronson, of the University of Texas, is that quantum mechanics is based on things called amplitudes. "Amplitudes are sort of like probabilities, but they can also be negative-in fact, they can also be complex numbers," he says. So if you want to know the probability that something will happen, you add up the amplitudes for all the different ways that it can happen, he says.

"The idea with a quantum computation is that you try to choreograph a pattern of interference so that for each wrong answer to your problem, some paths leading there have positive amplitudes and some have negative amplitudes, so they cancel each other out," Aaronson says. "Whereas the paths leading to the right answer all have amplitudes that are in phase with each other."

The tricky part is that you have to arrange everything not knowing in advance which answer is the right one. "So I would say it's the exponentiality of quantum states combined with this potential for interference between positive and negative amplitudes-that's really the source of the power of quantum computing," he says.

Did we mention that there are problems that a classical computer can't solve? You probably harness one such difficulty every day when you use encryption on the internet. The problem is that it's not easy to find the prime factors of a large number.

To review: The prime factors of 15 are 5 and 3. That's easy. If the number you're trying to factor has, say, 200 digits, it's very hard. Even with your laptop running an excellent algorithm, you might have to wait years to find the prime factors.

That brings us to another milestone in quantum computing: Shor's algorithm. Published in 1994 by Peter Shor, now a maths professor at MIT, the algorithm demonstrated an approach that you could use to find the factors of a big number-if you had a quantum computer, which didn't exist at the time. Essentially, Shor's algorithm would perform some operations that would point to the regions of numbers in which the answer was most likely to be found.

The following year, Shor also discovered a way to perform quantum error correction. "Then people really got the idea that, wow, this is a different way of computing things and is more powerful in certain test cases," says Robert Schoelkopf, director of the Yale Quantum Institute and Sterling professor of applied physics and physics.

"Then there was a big up-swelling of interest from the physics community to figure out how you could make quantum bits and logic gates between quantum bits and all of those things."

Two decades later, those things are here.

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Angry Birds, qubits and big ideas: Quantum computing is tantalisingly close - The Australian Financial Review

Thought you might find this interesting

Accenture and Biogenhave developeda first-of-a-kind quantum-enabled molecular comparison app designed to speed up drug discovery for complex neurological conditions such as MS, Alzheimers, Parkinsons and Lou Gehrigs disease. Researchers atAccenture Labscollaborated with 1QBit to create the new application which enhances Biogens existing molecule comparison method with quantum capabilities.

Molecular comparison is a crucial part of early-phase drug design and discovery, and involves intensive computational methods to review molecule matches and predict the positive effects of a therapy or drug while reducing negative side effects. Quantum computing is a computing paradigm that has the potential to find the answer to complex business problems millions of times faster than classical computing by leveraging the properties of quantum physics

By leveraging quantum computing technology from quantum software provider1QBit,the Accenture and Biogens appprovides new insight into the molecular comparison process, as well as much deeper contextual information about how, where and why molecules match. This is expected to enable scientists and researchers to analyze large collections of molecules more quickly and cost effectively.

The Alzheimers Association estimates that there are more than 5 million Americans living with the condition; by 2050, the number could rise to 16 million. Alzheimers is just one example of a condition that has staggering financial implications for the US healthcare system and families.This apphas the potential toenable scientists and researchers to analyze large collections of molecules more quickly and cost effectively, which can have a positive impact on finding treatments and cures.

In just over two months, Accenture Labs, Biogen and 1QBit progressed from an exploratory conversation about quantum business experimentation to an enterprise-ready, quantum-enabled application that generates molecular comparison results with deeper insights about shared traits. As quantum computers become more readily available, it will become easier for pharmaceutical companies to identify and develop new medicines for a wide range of diseases and conditions, saidJeff Elton, Ph.D., managing director, Accenture Strategy, Life Sciences.

Accenture Labs is focused on helping clients across multiple industries prepare for the arrival of mainstream quantum computing, which offers great potential to solve challenges in entirely new ways through quantum-enabled optimization, sampling, and machine learning algorithms, said Marc Carrel-Billiard, senior managing director, Accenture Labs. Through our collaboration with Biogen, 1QBit and our colleagues in the AccentureLife Sciences industry group, we have achieved a breakthrough that confirms the speed and accuracy of the quantum-enabled method for molecular comparison and takes another significant step toward improving the pharmaceutical industrys drug discovery and design process to help deliver better patient and economic outcomes more efficiently.

Continued here:

Accenture, Biogen, 1QBit Launch Quantum Computing App to ... - HIT Consultant

EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Quantum computing will present a very real threat in the next ten years and operators will have to rethink how they handle their data privacy and security, KPN chief information security officer (CISO) Jaya Baloo (pictured) told Mobile World Live.

When there is a viable quantum computer it will change the way we handle the current mechanism to protect our data secrecy which is cryptography, she explained, adding operators will have to rethink every type of cryptography they use and design new algorithms capable of resisting a quantum computing attack.

When it comes to operators offering personalised services, she said it is not possible to be 100 per cent privacy preserving while offering customised services.

However, operators should willingly and knowingly and very transparently inform customers about what they are doing with user data and how they maintain or securely delete that information.

Thats more important than the technology behind it having that dialogue is the most fundamental thing we can do.

She also shed light on the security implications of IoT and how KPN views the EU General Data Protection Regulation as much more in line with our current way of working rather than a burden.

Click here to watch the full interview.

The rest is here:

KPN CISO details Quantum computing attack dangers - Mobile World Live

Its a sunny Tuesdaymorning in late March at IBMs Thomas J. Watson Research Center. The corridor from the reception area follows the long, curving glass curtain-wall that looks out over the visitors parking lot to leafless trees covering a distant hill in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., an hour north of Manhattan. Walk past the podium from the Jeopardy! episodes at which IBMs Watson smote the human champion of the TV quiz show, turn right into a hallway, and youll enter a windowless lab where a quantum computer is chirping away.

Actually, chirp isnt quite the right word. Its a somewhat metallic sound, chush chush chush, thats made by the equipment that lowers the temperature inside a so-called dilution refrigerator to within hailing distance of absolute zero. Encapsulated in a white canister suspended from a frame, the dilution refrigerator cools a superconducting chip studded with a handful of quantum bits, or qubits.

When it's running, this dilution refrigerator at IBMs Thomas J. Watson Research Center is one of the coldest places in the universe. To cool superconducting bits on a quantum computer processor, it gets down to 15 millikelvin (-459F)colder than outer space.

Photographer: Christopher Payne for Bloomberg Markets

Quantum computing has been around, in theory if not in practice, for several decades. But these new types of machines, designed to harness quantum mechanics and potentially process unimaginable amounts of data, are certifiably a big deal. I would argue that a working quantum computer is perhaps the most sophisticated technology that humans have ever built, says Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing, a startup in Berkeley, Calif. Quantum computers, he says, harness nature at a level we became aware of only about 100 years agoone that isnt apparent to us in everyday life.

Whats more, the potential of quantum computing is enormous. Tapping into the weird way nature works could potentially speed up computing so some problems that are now intractable to classical computers could finally yield solutions. And maybe not just for chemistry and materials science. With practical breakthroughs in speed on the horizon, Wall Streets antennae are twitching.

The second investment that CME Group Inc.s venture arm ever made was in 1QB Information Technologies Inc., a quantum-computing software company in Vancouver. From the start at CME Ventures, weve been looking further ahead at transformational innovations and technologies that we think could have an impact on the financial-services industry in the future, says Rumi Morales, head of CME Ventures LLC.

That 1QBit financing round, in 2015, was led by Royal Bank of Scotland. Kevin Hanley, RBSs director of innovation, says quantum computing is likely to have the biggest impact on industries that are data-rich and time-sensitive. We think financial services is kind of in the cross hairs of that profile, he says.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is an investor in D-Wave Systems Inc., another quantum player, as is In-Q-Tel, the CIA-backed venture capital company, says Vern Brownell, CEO of D-Wave. The Burnaby, B.C.-based company makes machines that do something called quantum annealing. Quantum annealing is basically using the quantum computer to solve optimization problems at the lowest level, Brownell says. Weve taken a slightly different approach where were actually trying to engage with customers, make our computers more and more powerful, and provide this advantage to them in the form of a programmable, usable computer.

Marcos Lpez de Prado, a senior managing director at Guggenheim Partners LLC whos also a scientific adviser at 1QBit and a research fellow at the U.S. Department of Energys Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, says its all about context. The reason quantum computing is so exciting is its perfect marriage with machine learning, he says. I would go as far as to say that currently this is the main application for quantum computing.

Photographer: Christopher Payne for Bloomberg Markets

Part of that simply derives from the idea of a quantum computer: harnessing a physical device to find an answer, Lpez de Prado says. He sometimes explains it by pointing to the video game Angry Birds. When you play it on your iPad, the central processing units use some mathematical equations that have been programmed into a library to simulate the effects of gravity and the interaction of objects bouncing and colliding. This is how digital computers work, he says.

By contrast, quantum computers turn that approach on its head, Lpez de Prado says. The paradigm for quantum computers is this: Lets throw some birds and see what happens. Encode into the quantum microchip this problem: These are your birds and where you throw them from, so whats the optimal trajectory? Then you let the computer check all possible solutions essentiallyor a very large combination of themand come back with an answer, he says. In a quantum computer, theres no mathematician cracking the problem, he says. The laws of physics crack the problem for you.

The fundamental building blocksof our world are quantum mechanical. If you look at a molecule, says Dario Gil, vice president for science and solutions at IBM Research, the reason molecules form and are stable is because of the interactions of these electron orbitals. Each calculation in thereeach orbitalis a quantum mechanical calculation. The number of those calculations, in turn, increases exponentially with the number of electrons youre trying to model. By the time you have 50 electrons, you have 2 to the 50th power calculations, Gil says. Thats a phenomenally large number, so we cant compute it today, he says. (For the record, its 1.125 quadrillion. So if you fired up your laptop and started cranking through several calculations a second, it would take a few million years to run through them all.) Connecting information theory to physics could provide a path to solving such problems, Gil says. A 50-qubit quantum computer might begin to be able to do it.

Landon Downs, president and co-founder of 1QBit, says its now becoming possible to unlock the computational power of the quantum world. This has huge implications for producing new materials or creating new drugs, because we can actually move from a paradigm of discovery to a new era of quantum design, he says in an email. Rigetti, whose company is building hybrid quantum-classical machines, says one moonshot use of quantum computing could be to model catalysts that remove carbon and nitrogen from the atmosphereand thereby help fix global warming. (Bloomberg Beta LP, a venture capital unit of Bloomberg LP, is an investor in Rigetti Computing.)

The quantum-computing community hums with activity and excitement these days. Teams around the worldat startups, corporations, universities, and government labsare racing to build machines using a welter of different approaches to process quantum information. Superconducting qubit chips too elementary for you? How about trapped ions, which have brought together researchers from the University of Maryland and the National Institute of Standards and Technology? Or maybe the topological approach that Microsoft Corp. is developing through an international effort called Station Q? The aim is to harness a particle called a non-abelian anyonwhich has not yet been definitively proven to exist.

These are early days, to be sure. As of late May, the number of quantum computers in the world that clearly, unequivocally do something faster or better than a classical computer remains zero, according to Scott Aaronson, a professor of computer science and director of the Quantum Information Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Such a signal event would establish quantum supremacy. In Aaronsons words: That we dont have yet.

Yet someone may accomplish the feat as soon as this year. Most insiders say one clear favorite is a group at Google Inc. led by John Martinis, a physics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. According to Martinis, the groups goal is to achieve supremacy with a 49-qubit chip. As of late May, he says, the team was testing a 22-qubit processor as an intermediate step toward a showdown with a classical supercomputer. We are optimistic about this, since prior chips have worked well, he said in an email.

The idea of usingquantum mechanics to process information dates back decades. One key event happened in 1981, when International Business Machines Corp. and MIT co-sponsored a conference on the physics of computation at the universitys Endicott House in Dedham, Mass. At the conference, Richard Feynman, the famed physicist, proposed building a quantum computer. Nature isnt classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, youd better make it quantum mechanical, he said in his talk. And by golly, its a wonderful problem, because it doesnt look so easy.

He got that part right. The basic idea is to take advantage of a couple of the weird properties of the atomic realm: superposition and entanglement. Superposition is the mind-bending observation that a particle can be in two states at the same time. Bring out your ruler to get a measurement, however, and the particle will collapse into one state or the other. And you wont know which until you try, except in terms of probabilities. This effect is what underlies Schrdingers cat, the thought-experiment animal thats both alive and dead in a box until you sneak a peek.

Sure, bending your brain around that one doesnt come especially easy; nothing in everyday life works that way, of course. Yet about 1 million experiments since the early 20th century show that superposition is a thing. And if superposition happens to be your thing, the next step is figuring out how to strap such a crazy concept into a harness.

An IBM quantum-computing processor mounted on a circuit board. The silicon chip in the center contains several quantum bits, or qubits.

Photographer: Christopher Payne for Bloomberg Markets

Enter qubits. Classical bits can be a 0 or a 1; run a string of them together through logic gates (AND, OR, NOT, etc.), and youll multiply numbers, draw an image, and whatnot. A qubit, by contrast, can be a 0, a 1, or both at the same time, says IBMs Gil.

Ready for entanglement? (Youre in good company if you balk; Albert Einstein famously rebelled against the idea, calling it spooky action at a distance.) Well, lets say two qubits were to get entangled; Gil says that would make them perfectly correlated. A quantum computer could then utilize a menagerie of distinctive logic gates. The so-called Hadamard gate, for example, puts a qubit into a state of perfect superposition. (There may be something called a square root of NOT gate, but lets take a pass on that one.) If you tap the superposition and entanglement in clever arrangements of the weird quantum gates, you start to get at the potential power of quantum computing.

If you have two qubits, you can explore four states: 00, 01, 10, and 11. (Note that thats 4: 2 raised to the power 2.) When I perform a logical operation on my quantum computer, I can operate on all of this at once, Gil says. And the number of states you can look at is 2 raised to the power of the number of qubits. So if you could make a 50-qubit universal quantum computer, you could in theory explore all of those 1.125 quadrillion statesat the same time.

What gives quantum computing its special advantage, says Aaronson, of the University of Texas, is that quantum mechanics is based on things called amplitudes. Amplitudes are sort of like probabilities, but they can also be negativein fact, they can also be complex numbers, he says. So if you want to know the probability that something will happen, you add up the amplitudes for all the different ways that it can happen, he says.

The idea with a quantum computation is that you try to choreograph a pattern of interference so that for each wrong answer to your problem, some paths leading there have positive amplitudes and some have negative amplitudes, so they cancel each other out, Aaronson says. Whereas the paths leading to the right answer all have amplitudes that are in phase with each other. The tricky part is that you have to arrange everything not knowing in advance which answer is the right one. So I would say its the exponentiality of quantum states combined with this potential for interference between positive and negative amplitudesthats really the source of the power of quantum computing, he says.

Cover artwork: Zachary Walsh

Did we mentionthat there are problems that a classical computer cant solve? You probably harness one such difficulty every day when you use encryption on the internet. The problem is that its not easy to find the prime factors of a large number. To review: The prime factors of 15 are 5 and 3. Thats easy. If the number youre trying to factor has, say, 200 digits, its very hard. Even with your laptop running an excellent algorithm, you might have to wait years to find the prime factors.

That brings us to another milestone in quantum computing: Shors algorithm. Published in 1994 by Peter Shor, now a math professor at MIT, the algorithm demonstrated an approach that you could use to find the factors of a big numberif you had a quantum computer, which didnt exist at the time. Essentially, Shors algorithm would perform some operations that would point to the regions of numbers in which the answer was most likely to be found.

The following year, Shor also discovered a way to perform quantum error correction. Then people really got the idea that, wow, this is a different way of computing things and is more powerful in certain test cases, says Robert Schoelkopf, director of the Yale Quantum Institute and Sterling professor of applied physics and physics. Then there was a big upswelling of interest from the physics community to figure out how you could make quantum bits and logic gates between quantum bits and all of those things.

Two decades later, those things are here.

Asmundsson is editor of Bloomberg Markets.

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The Machine of Tomorrow Today: Quantum Computing on the Verge - Bloomberg

Machine learning, the field of AI that allows Alexa and Siri to parse what you say and self-driving cars to safely drive down a city street, could benefit from quantum computer-derived speedups, say researchers. And if a technology incubator program in Toronto, Canada has its way, there may even bequantum machine learningstartup companies launching in a few years too.

Research in this hybrid field today concentrates on either using nascent quantum computers to speed up machine learning algorithms or, using conventional machine learning systems, to increase the power, durability, or effectiveness of quantum computer systems. An ultimate goal in the field is to do both use smaller quantum-computer-based machine learning systems to better improve, understand, or interpret large datasets of quantum information or the results of large-scale quantum computer calculations. This last goal will of course have to wait till large-scale quantum information storage and full-fledged quantum computers come online. Google has said they want to make a 49-qubit quantum computer by years end, so a machine thats the hundreds or thousands of qubits that might benefit from such secondary quantum technologies may still take years.

However, says Peter Wittek, research fellow at the Institute of Photonic Sciences in Castelldefels, Spain, researchers havent waited for super-duper quantum computers to begin experimenting and theorizing about the future of the field. Quantum machine learning, even in its earliest incarnations, still holds promise.

To build universal quantum computers is a big engineering challenge, says Wittek, whos also academic director at theCreative Destruction Labstartup incubator affiliated with the University of Torontos Rotman School of Management. But it turns out for quantum machine learning you need something less. Just like quantum cryptography and quantum random number generation have matured as technologies in the absence of big quantum computers, he says, so too might quantum machine learning find niches to expand into in the near term.

Wittek, author of the 2014 bookQuantum Machine Learning: What Quantum Computing Means to Data Mining, says the field took off after a 2008 quantumalgorithmcalled HHL (after its three creators Aram Harrow, Avinathan Hassidim, and Seth Lloyd). HHL solves vast linear algebra problems involving many degrees of freedom, potentially faster than could be solved on any traditional supercomputer. And since no small part of machine learning involves just these sorts of high-degree-of-freedom (high-dimension) algebra problems, some machine learning researchers have jumped on the HHL bandwagon. HHL-based quantum machine learning algorithms have proliferated in the technical literature over the past few years.

Yet, Wittek says, for all its brilliance, HHL may not even represent the most promising set of near-term applications which he speculates could instead be found in fields like finance, transportation, or medicine.

That said, he adds, most traditional, GPU-based machine learning applications will not be knocked off their perch by a quantum system, even if Google, IBM, or another research lab can one day build a practicable quantum computer. Conventional machine learning is plenty game-changing as it is in most applications.

However, Wittek says, standard machine learning algorithms have a hard time generating purely random numbers. Monte Carlo machine learning algorithms, often used in financial applications, require purely random numbers for optimal results. But often pseudo-random numbers are the best a classical computer can generate. Quantum systems, by contrast, practically define pure randomness. So a quantum machine learning could have a foothold here.

And, says Nathan Wiebe, researcher at Microsofts Quantum Architectures and Computation Group in Redmond, Wash., quantum machine learning systems will work especially well when the input is not the 0s and 1s of classical data but rather the qubits of the quantum computer.

If you think about a quantum computer, how do you understand whats going on inside one? Wiebe says. The vectors that describe it exist in an incomprehensibly large space. Theres no way you can go through, read off every single entry of those vectors and figure out if the machine is working properly.

According to Scott Aaronson, professor of computer science at the University of Texas at Austin, HHL has led to more hype than actual near-term hope in the field. As Aaronson argues in a skeptical 2015review of quantum machine learningresearch, the words caveat emptor should be tagged to any promise of quantum machine learning-powered breakthroughs.

Almost all the quantum machine learning algorithms that have been published over the last decade are really frameworks for algorithms, Aaronson says. Theyre algorithms that dont start with the classical problem that you would like to be solved and the answer to that problem.

Still, says Wittek, despite the technical objections, the number of applicants to this years quantum machine learningbootcamp and startup acceleratorin Toronto exceeded expectations. The final round of applications will close on 24 July, and as of mid-June they had already received 38 applications for the 40 available spots. Clearly something has inspired entrepreneurs to try their hand turning bold ideas into, possibly, working quantum machine learning technology.

Incorporation must be done by November, so these will be real companies, Wittek says. And the hope is by next summer well have companies raising money.

As Einstein once objected about quantum physics, God may not play dice. But angel investors, these future companies can only hope, do.

This post was updated at 9:30 a.m. on 13 June.

IEEE Spectrums general technology blog, featuring news, analysis, and opinions about engineering, consumer electronics, and technology and society, from the editorial staff and freelance contributors.

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By the end of 2017, Google hopes to make a 49-qubit chip that will prove quantum computers can beat classical machines 24May

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A Hybrid of Quantum Computing and Machine Learning Is Spawning New Ventures - IEEE Spectrum

The exciting landscape of modern life has been built with the aid of powerful computers. They have done dazzling things, from making the trains run on time to helping to build skyscrapers. Now, imagine a discontinuity in computing in which these capabilities are suddenly expanded and enhanced by orders of magnitude.

You wont have to imagine too much longer. It is in the process of happening. The fascinating thing is that this change is based on quantum science, which is completely counter-intuitive and not fully understood, even by those who are harnessing it.

Todays computers are binary, meaning that they are based on bits that represent either a 1 or a 0. As fast as they go, this is a basic, physical gating factor that limits how much work they can do in a given amount of time. The next wave of computers uses quantum bits called qubits that can simultaneously represent a 1 and a 0. This root of the mysteries that even scientists refer to as quantum weirdness allows the computers to do computations in parallel instead of sequentially. Not surprisingly, this greatly expands the ability of this class of computers.

The details of how quantum computers operate are more or less impossible to understand. A couple of related points are clear, however: Harnessing the power of quantum mechanics to create incredibly powerful machines is not a pipe dream: Companies such as IBM, Microsoft and Google, as well as startups and universities, dont sink billions of dollars in flights of fancy.

The second point is that the payoff is here, or at least quite near. The world of computing wont instantaneously change once quantum actions are proven. It is still a long road to being fully commercialized, bypassing classical approaches and, finally, living up to the most extravagant promise.

In late May, Microsoft and Purdue University announced research on quantum computing that focuses on one of the key challenges, which is the extraordinarily fragile nature of the qubits. Indeed, the subject of the research is a good example of the amazing complexity of the field and how far it has to go.

In quantum mechanics, the mere act of looking at the system makes it choose between the 1 and the 0 and exit the quantum state. The task of the Microsoft/Purdue research is to develop topological qubits that are stable enough to function in the real world.

In essence, according to Professor Michael Manfra, the university's Bill and Dee O'Brien Chair Professor of Physics and Astronomy, stability increases as the quantum properties are spread out.

The quantum variable that houses information is really a property of the quantum system as [a] whole, he wrote to IT Business Edge in response to emailed questions. More particles may be needed to define the qubit, but this complexity has an advantage while a local disturbance or perturbation can flip an individual spin, it is much less likely to change the state of the entire quantum system that comprises a topological qubit.Therefore these topological qubits are expected to be more robust.They do not couple well to the commonly occurring noise in the environment.

Preparing for the Quantum Future

There is an angle to all of this that is refreshingly straightforward and accessible, however: Great change is coming and companies need to prepare for quantum computing. Indeed, even assuming that the high-profile changes are down the road a bit, they will be massive when they do arrive.

The bottom line is that planners need to think about quantum computing. A logical first step in assessing the impact is identifying the tasks it will most likely perform. In responses to emailed questions, Jerry Chow, the manager of Experimental Quantum Computing for IBM, told IT Business Edge that four areas likely to be affected are business optimization (in areas such as the supply chain, logistics, modeling financial data and risk analysis); materials and chemistry; artificial intelligence and cloud security.

Things may not be quite as clear cut, however. David Schatsky, the managing director of Deloitte LLP, told IT Business Edge, in response to emailed questions, that risk management, investment portfolio design, trading strategies, and the design of transportation and communications networks will be affected. Quantum computer, he wrote, could be disruptive in cryptography, drug design, energy, nano-engineering and research.

Thats an almost intimidating list. However, Schatsky prefaced it with a disclaimer: Quantum computing will entirely transform some kinds of work and have negligible impact on others. The truth is, researchers dont yet know all the types of problems quantum computing may be good for.

There Is Still Time to Prepare

Luckily, planners have time. Quantum computing will be a massive change, but one that will be gradual. It makes sense to think of quantum computing as a new segment of the supercomputer market, which is a small fraction of overall IT spending, Schatsky wrote. Annual supercomputer server sales total about $11 billion globally by some estimates. I suspect quantum computing revenues will be a very small fraction of that for years to come. So Im not sure its going to become common anytime soon.

Though it clearly will be quite a while before people are buying quantum computers on Amazon, organizations need to be thinking about quantum computing today. The power of quantum computing is so extreme, especially when coupled with artificial intelligence and other emerging techniques, it is clear that all of that time must be put to good use.

IBMs Chow said that quantum-driven platforms such as Watson will be able to find patterns that are buried too deeply for classical computers. This will open new frontiers for discovery, he wrote.

It is a new age, not a new computer.

Corporations should ask: How do I learn about quantum computing to get a feel for where it might make a difference? Now is the time to realize its enormous potential, and that this is a field ripe for innovation and exploration that goes beyond simply just an end application. Becoming quantum-ready is about participating in a revolution within computing. People need to learn the details enough to open their minds up about what could be possible.

And, eventually, quantum mechanics may go beyond computing.

In general terms, I believe the development of quantum technologies is inevitable quantum computing is perhaps just the most visible example, Manfra wrote. It is not hard to imagine that certain businesses in which innovation may be enhanced by dramatic improvement in computational capabilities will need to have long-term plans which exploit quantum machines once they become available.

Carl Weinschenk covers telecom for IT Business Edge. He writes about wireless technology, disaster recovery/business continuity, cellular services, the Internet of Things, machine-to-machine communications and other emerging technologies and platforms. He also covers net neutrality and related regulatory issues. Weinschenk has written about the phone companies, cable operators and related companies for decades and is senior editor of Broadband Technology Report. He can be reached at cweinsch@optonline.net and via twitter at @DailyMusicBrk.

Excerpt from:

Are Enterprises Ready to Take a Quantum Leap? - IT Business Edge

If using quantum mechanics to compute problems that are unsolvable with todays fastest supercomputers sounds outrageously ambitious, thats because it is. There are many experts who say that it cant be done.

But thats not stopping Jungsang Kim, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke University, from pursuing the impossible. A pioneer in translating theoretical quantum physics into physical hardware, Kim has been engineering the components for a quantum computer at Duke for more than a decade.

And hes starting to sniff the finish line.

Weve put together and demonstrated all of the individual components needed to build a large, scalable quantum computer, said Kim. We are convinced that within the next few years we could turn this technology into much more sophisticated quantum computers with the potential to solve problems considered impossible today.

Imagine a computer trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle. Because computer code is binary, either a piece fits or it doesnt, the most efficient method would be to pick a piece at random and attempt to attach every other available piece until one fits. Todays computers would then take that two-piece unit, and repeat the entire process over and over until the puzzle is completed.

Even with todays supercomputers, this process would take a long time because it must be done sequentially. Quantum computers, however, have the advantage of occupying many different states at the same time.

Now imagine a quantum computer with enough qubitsindividual pieces of memory analogous to todays transistorsto assign one to each puzzle piece. Thanks to quantum mechanics, all possible configurations are stored into a quantum memory, which is manipulated in a very careful way so that all the non-answers fade away very quickly and all the real answers emerge in a systematic way. This allows the quantum computer to converge on a solution much more efficiently than a classical computer.

Nobel Laureate Bill Phillips said that using quantum principles to compute is as different from classical computing as a classical supercomputer is from an abacus, said Kim. There are, however, several different ways that one might achieve this. Our group has focused on approaches using individually trapped ions.

The qubits in Kims quantum computer are individually trapped ionsatoms with electrons stripped away to give it a positive electric charge. That charge allows researchers to suspend the atoms using an electromagnetic field in an ultra-high vacuum. Kim and his colleagues then use precise lasers to manipulate their quantum states.

The method is promising. Kim and colleague Christopher Monroe at the University of Maryland have secured more than $60 million in grants to transition these ideas into large, scalable quantum computers. And theyre not alonemany other big companies like Google, IBM, Microsoft and Intel are starting to make big investments as well.

With the potential to revolutionize industries such as materials design, pharmaceutical discovery and security encryption, the race is on. And Kim and his colleagues are the only ones betting on trapped ions, having started a company called IonQ to pursue commercialization of the technology.

Our collaboration actually has a small qubit quantum computer that's very generally programmable, said Kim. We think we know how to take this system and turn it into a much bigger system that is reliable, stable and much more scalable. We've come to a point where we believe that even commercially viable systems can be put together.

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From the Abacus to Supercomputers to Quantum Computers - Duke Today

In 2016, Purdue University and Microsoft have signed a five-year agreement to develop a useable quantum computer. Purdue is one of four international universities in the collaboration. Michael Manfra, Purdue Universitys Bill and Dee OBrien Chair Professor of Physics and Astronomy, professor of materials engineering and professor of electrical and computer engineering, will lead the effort at Purdue to build a robust and scalable quantum computer by producing what scientists call a topological qubit.

The team assembled by Microsoft will work on a type of quantum computer that is expected to be especially robust against interference from its surroundings, a situation known in quantum computing as decoherence. The scalable topological quantum computer is theoretically more stable and less error-prone.

One of the challenges in quantum computing is that the qubits interact with their environment and lose their quantum information before computations can be completed, Manfra says. Topological quantum computing utilizes qubits that store information non-locally and the outside noise sources have less effect on the qubit, so we expect it to be more robust.

Purdue University and Microsoft Corp. have signed a five-year agreement to develop a useable quantum computer. Purdue is one of four international universities in the collaboration. Michael Manfra, Purdue Universitys Bill and Dee OBrien Chair Professor of Physics and Astronomy, Professor of Materials Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, will lead the effort at Purdue to build a robust and scalable quantum computer by producing what scientists call a topological qubit. (Purdue University photo/Rebecca Wilcox)

Arxiv Topological Quantum Computation

The theory of quantum computation can be constructed from the abstract study of anyonic systems. In mathematical terms, these are unitary topological modular functors. They underlie the Jones polynomial and arise in Witten-Chern-Simons theory. The braiding and fusion of anyonic excitations in quantum Hall electron liquids and 2D-magnets are modeled by modular functors, opening a new possibility for the realization of quantum computers. The chief advantage of anyonic computation would be physical error correction: An error rate scaling like e, where is a length scale, and is some positive constant. In contrast, the presumptive qubit-model of quantum computation, which repairs errors combinatorically, requires a fantastically low initial error rate (about 10^4) before computation can be stabilized.

Manfra says that the most exciting challenge associated with building a topological quantum computer is that the Microsoft team must simultaneously solve problems of material science, condensed matter physics, electrical engineering and computer architecture.

This is why Microsoft has assembled such a diverse set of talented people to tackle this large-scale problem, Manfra says. No one person or group can be expert in all aspects.

Purdue and Microsoft entered into an agreement in April 2016 that extends their collaboration on quantum computing research, effectively establishing Station Q Purdue, one of the Station Q experimental research sites that work closely with two Station Q theory sites.

Purdues role in the project will be to grow and study ultra-pure semiconductors and hybrid systems of semiconductors and superconductors that may form the physical platform upon which a quantum computer is built. Manfras group has expertise in a technique called molecular beam epitaxy, and this technique will be used to build low dimensional electron systems that form the basis for quantum bits, or qubits.

The work at Purdue will be done in the Birck Nanotechnology Center in the universitys Discovery Park, and well as in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. The Birck facility houses the multi-chamber molecular beam epitaxy system, in which three fabrication chambers are connected under ultra-high vacuum. It also contains clean-room fabrication, and necessary materials characterization tools.

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Microsoft and Purdue work on scalable topological quantum computer - Next Big Future