Lifeboat Foundation

According to Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chair of the World Economic Forum (WEF), the 4-IR follows the first, second, and third Industrial Revolutions—the mechanical, electrical, and digital, respectively. The 4-IR builds on the digital revolution, but Schwab sees the 4-IR as an exponential takeoff and convergence of existing and emerging fields, including Big Data; artificial intelligence; machine learning; quantum computing; and genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics. The consequence is the merging of the physical, digital, and biological worlds. The blurring of these categories ultimately challenges the very ontologies by which we understand ourselves and the world, including “what it means to be human.”

The specific applications that make up the 4-R are too numerous and sundry to treat in full, but they include a ubiquitous internet, the internet of things, the internet of bodies, autonomous vehicles, smart cities, 3D printing, nanotechnology, biotechnology, materials science, energy storage, and more.

While Schwab and the WEF promote a particular vision for the 4-IR, the developments he announces are not his brainchildren, and there is nothing original about his formulations. Transhumanists and Singularitarians (or prophets of the technological singularity), such as Ray Kurzweil and many others, forecasted these and more revolutionary developments,. long before Schwab heralded them. The significance of Schwab and the WEF’s take on the new technological revolution is the attempt to harness it to a particular end, presumably “a fairer, greener future.”

Lightspeed is the fastest velocity in the universe. Except when it isn’t. Anyone who’s seen a prism split white light into a rainbow has witnessed how material properties can influence the behavior of quantum objects: in this case, the speed at which light propagates.

Electrons also behave differently in materials than they do in free space, and understanding how is critical for scientists studying material properties and engineers looking to develop new technologies. “An electron’s wave nature is very particular. And if you want to design devices in the future that take advantage of this quantum mechanical nature, you need to know those wavefunctions really well,” explained co-author Joe Costello, a UC Santa Barbara graduate student in condensed matter physics.

In a new paper, co-lead authors Costello, Seamus O’Hara and Qile Wu and their collaborators developed a method to calculate this wave nature, called a Bloch wavefunction, from physical measurements. “This is the first time that there’s been experimental reconstruction of a Bloch wavefunction,” said senior author Mark Sherwin, a professor of condensed matter physics at UC Santa Barbara. The team’s findings appear in the journal Nature, coming out more than 90 years after Felix Bloch first described the behavior of electrons in crystalline solids.

Physicists have created a modem for the quantum internet of the future, giving powerful quantum computers a way to share information.

Short for circuit layer operations per second.

IBM has announced the creation of what could become the new performance metric for quantum computers: Circuit Layer Operations per Second (CLOPS). The aim is to allow customers and providers of quantum systems to easily understand performance differences between products.

I wonder what the Sputnik moment would need to be in the AI race to trigger panic AI research spending in the US. It would probably have to be China hitting AGI first.

Native CPU and accelerator architectures that have been in play on China’s previous large systems have been stepped up to make China first to exascale on two fronts.

The National Supercomputing Center in Wuxi is set to unveil some striking news based on quantum simulation results on a forthcoming homegrown Sunway supercomputer.

Continue reading “China Has Already Reached Exascale — On Two Separate Systems” »

A new analytical technique is able to provide hitherto unattainable insights into the extremely rapid dynamics of biomolecules. The team of developers, led by Abbas Ourmazd from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and Robin Santra from DESY, is presenting its clever combination of quantum physics and molecular biology in the scientific journal Nature. The scientists used the technique to track the way in which the photoactive yellow protein (PYP) undergoes changes in its structure in less than a trillionth of a second after being excited by light.

“In order to precisely understand biochemical processes in nature, such as photosynthesis in certain bacteria, it is important to know the detailed sequence of events,” Santra says. “When light strikes photoactive proteins, their spatial structure is altered, and this structural change determines what role a protein takes on in nature.”

Until now, however, it has been almost impossible to track the exact sequence in which structural changes occur. Only the initial and final states of a molecule before and after a reaction can be determined and interpreted in theoretical terms. “But we don’t know exactly how the energy and shape changes in between the two,” says Santra. “It’s like seeing that someone has folded their hands, but you can’t see them interlacing their fingers to do so.”

Isaac Nape, an emerging South African talent in the study of quantum optics, is part of a crack team of Wits physicists who led an international study that revealed the hidden structures of quantum entangled states. The study was published in the renowned scientific journal, Nature Communications.

Nape is pursuing his PhD at Wits University and focuses on harnessing structured patterns of light for high dimensional information encoding and decoding for use in quantum communication.

Earlier this year he scooped up two awards at the South African Institute of Physics (SAIP) conference to add to his growing collection of accolades in the field of optics and photonics. He won the award for ‘Best PhD oral presentation in applied physics’, and jointly won the award for ‘Best PhD oral presentation in photonics’.

‘’A research team with Denmark’s University of Copenhagen has designed the world’s first quantum computing system that allows for simultaneous operation of all its qubits without threatening quantum coherence.’’

A team of researchers from Denmark have achieved a breakthrough in quantum computing by designing a system that allows for all qubits to be manipulated and observed — at the same time — without compromising the system’s quantum coherence.

Speed is only one of the three critical attributes that reflect the performance of a quantum computer, according to IBM, with the two others being scale and quality. Scale is measured by the number of qubits that the quantum processor supports, while quality can be determined thanks to quantum volume, which is another benchmark that IBM developed in 2017 to gauge how faithfully a quantum circuit can be implemented in a quantum computing system.

SEE: What is quantum computing? Everything you need to know about the strange world of quantum computers

Quantum volume is a metric that is now widely adopted across the industry, with major players like Honeywell basing performance measurements on the benchmark. IBM hopes that CLOPS will follow a similar path and this way enable quantum computing companies to put numbers on all three aspects of performance.