Google appears to be more confident about the technical capabilities of its D-Wave 2X quantum computer, which it operates alongside NASA at the U.S. space agency’s Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
D-Wave’s machines are the closest thing we have today to quantum computing, which work with quantum bits, or qubits — each of which can be zero or one or both — instead of more conventional bits. The superposition of these qubits can allow great numbers of computations to be performed simultaneously, making a quantum computer highly desirable for certain types of processes.
In two tests, the Google Quantum Artificial Intelligence (AI) Lab today announced that it has found the D-Wave machine to be considerably faster than simulated annealing — a simulation of quantum computation on a classical computer chip.
