D-Wave system shows quantum computers can learn to detect particle signatures in mountains of data, but doesn’t outpace conventional methods — yet.
- By Davide Castelvecchi, Nature on October 22, 2017
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Category: computing – Page 736
Researchers from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia, have used liquid metal to create two-dimensional materials no thicker than a few atoms that have never before been seen in nature.
The incredible breakthrough will not only revolutionise the way we do chemistry but could be applied to enhance data storage and make faster electronics. The “once-in-a-decade” discovery has been published in Science.
The researchers dissolve metals in liquid metal to create very thin oxide layers, which previously did not exist as layered structures and which are easily peeled away.
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Sending satellites into space is going to continue to get cheaper since SpaceX proved it could reliably launch refurbished rockets. This is going to open up space exploration to more entities allowing for the continued democratization of space. Other technological advances could make a global space centered sharing economy a real possibility.
The rise of the internet and the ubiquity of mobile computing devices have changed everything from travel and shopping to politics – think Uber, Amazon, and Twitter.
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Intel’s quantum computing efforts have yielded a new 17-qubit chip, which the company has just delivered to its partner in that field, QuTech in the Netherlands. It’s not a major advance in the actual computing power or applications — those are still in very early days — but it’s a step toward production systems that can be ordered and delivered to spec rather than experimental ones that live in a physics lab somewhere.
Intel’s celebration of this particular chip is a bit arbitrary; 17 isn’t some magic number in the quantum world, nor does this chip do any special tricks other quantum computer systems can’t. Intel is just happy that its history and undeniable expertise in designing and fabricating chips and architectures is paying off in a new phase of computing.
I chatted with Intel’s director of quantum hardware, Jim Clarke, about the new system.
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Intel says it is shipping an experimental quantum computing chip to research partners in The Netherlands today. The company hopes to demonstrate that its packaging and integration skills give it an edge in the race to produce practical quantum computers.
The chip contains 17 superconducting qubits—the quantum computer’s fundamental component. According to Jim Clarke, Intel’s director of quantum hardware, the company chose 17 qubits because it’s the minimum needed to perform surface code error correction, an algorithm thought to be necessary to scaling up quantum computers to useful sizes.
Intel’s research partners, at the TU Delft and TNO research center Qutech, will be testing the individual qubits’ abilities as well as performing surface code error correction and other algorithms.
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At its Ignite developer conference yesterday, Microsoft announced that it has developed a new programming language designed to not only run on current computers but on the most advanced machines of the future: quantum computers. Ignite is running from Sept. 25–29 in Orlando.
Like many other of the world’s largest tech companies, Microsoft has been working to develop quantum computers that could handle massively complex problems in minutes or seconds. Unlike today’s conventional devices that use the digital bits “0” and “1,” quantum computers use qubits that can act as 0s, 1s or both simultaneously.
Microsoft said its new quantum computing language, which has yet to be named, is “deeply integrated” into its Visual Basic development environment and does many of the things other standard programming languages do. However, it is specifically designed to allow programmers to create apps that will eventually run on true quantum computers.
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