Quantum Machine Learning: Unleashing AI’s Full Potential

At Rice CS, we cover multiple subfields of quantum information science and computing including (hybrid/variational) quantum algorithms and quantum characterization/verification. In 2023, Quantum computing is moving out of the basement laboratories of university physics departments and into industrial research and development facilities. The move is backed by the chequebooks of multinational corporations and venture capitalists. In materials science, quantum computers will be able to simulate molecular structures at the atomic scale, making it faster and easier to discover new and interesting materials. This may have significant applications in batteries, pharmaceuticals, fertilisers and other chemistry-based domains.

1\rangle∣1⟩ states often aren’t difficult to think about, since they often correspond to very concrete physical states of the world, much like classical bits. Indeed, in some proposals they may correspond to different charge configurations, similar to dynamic RAM. Or perhaps a photon being in one of two different locations in space – again, a pretty simple, concrete notion, even if photons aren’t that familiar. There are also many more exotic proposals for the ∣0⟩

In terms of operation quality, this puts their technology’s performance on par with other leading types of quantum computing platforms, like superconducting qubits and trapped-ion qubits. In this article, “quantum computing” has so far been used as a blanket term describing all computations that utilize quantum phenomena. In it, qubits are prepared in initial states and then subject to a series of “gate operations,” like current or laser pulses depending on qubit type.

Grover’s Algorithm in Qiskit

The idea is that the 100,000 qubits will work alongside the best “classical” supercomputers to achieve new breakthroughs in drug discovery, fertilizer production, battery performance, and a host of other applications. “I call this quantum-centric supercomputing,” IBM’s VP of quantum, Jay Gambetta, told MIT Technology Review in an in-person interview in London last week. In 2021, researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria and a spin-off company called Alpine Quantum Technologies unveiled a 29-qubit trapped-ion computer that could fit into a pair of server cabinets. Thomas Monz, CEO of AQT and a researcher at the university, says that there’s not enough detail on the new computers to meaningfully comment on them. The Forte Enterprise will be available from next year and feature 35 “algorithmic qubits” (AQ)—a metric invented by the company to denote the number of qubits in a processor that can be put to useful work, rather than the sheer number of physical qubits.

“The blurred line between industry and national security in China gives them an advantage,” says David Spirk, former chief data officer at the Department of Defense. Molecules—the building blocks of the universe—are multiple atoms bound together by electrons that exist as part of each. The way these electrons essentially occupy two states at once is what quantum particles replicate, presenting applications for natural and material sciences by predicting how drugs interact with the human body, or substances perform under corrosion. Traditional manufacturing takes calculated guesses to make breakthroughs through trial and error; by mirroring the natural world, quantum should allow advances to be purposefully designed. If anything, it’s surprising that traditional computing has taken us so far. From the trail-blazing Apple II of the late 1970s to today’s smartphones and supercomputers, all processors break down tasks into binary.

Quantum computing is a game changer

IDC believes that the quantum computing market will continue to experience slow growth until there is a significant breakthrough in quantum hardware development that delivers a quantum advantage. In the meantime, most growth will be driven by improvements in quantum computing infrastructure and platforms and the rise of performance-intensive computing tasks suitable for quantum technology. IDC also expects investments in the quantum computing market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 11.5% from 2023 to 2027, amounting to approximately $16.4 billion by the end of 2027. The machines are useful for research and experimentation but not practical problems.

The quantum computers available today are small, noisy prototypes, but the field is progressing rapidly. Quantum computers may soon become a critical part of the computing landscape as we move beyond cutting-edge Exascale computers. Quantum computers are computers that consist of quantum bits, or “qubits,” that play a similar role to the bits in today’s digital computers. The laws of quantum mechanics allow qubits to encode exponentially more information than bits. By manipulating information stored in these qubits, scientists can quickly produce high-quality solutions to difficult problems. This means quantum computing may revolutionize our ability to solve problems that are hard to address with even the largest supercomputers.

For decades, the computer within your device with which you are reading this article right now was only a theoretical assumption. And the worldwide race to develop the most efficient computer is still in full swing. Today’s situation with quantum computers is similar, for which, despite initial successes, widespread use will probably still be many years away. So, can quantum computers in future become universally accepted faster than expected like once computers were, and are there already quantum computers that have made their way beyond theory? They’re all in a race, along with IBM, to build a computer with more qubits. Atom’s secret sauce is knowing how to scale its tech by 10-times, Ging said.

Entanglement with the environment implies decoherence and loss of useful information within the computer. It is easiest to avoid in an isolated small system, hence the interest in realizing quantum computers using nanotechnology. Cloud computing, Internet of Things (IoT), artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality, robotics, quantum computing, machine learning, neural network, pattern recognition are some of the innovation in the transformed landscape.

The challenge of quantum computing

In 2007, the Polish city of Poznań erected a monument to three Polish mathematicians—Jerzy Rózycki, Henryk Zygalski, and Marian Rejewski—who in the 1930s began decrypting German Enigma cypher machines. Enigma-type encryption is similar to modern message encoding in that it relies on a vast number of potential codes to make it effectively unbreakable. In 1939 the Polish mathematicians shared their codebreaking with the British and the French, but the contribution of the Polish mathematicians was not widely known until decades later.

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Bluntly, if they don’t explain the actual underlying mathematical model, then you could spend years watching and rewatching such videos, and you’d never really get it. It’s like hanging out with a group of basketball players and listening to them talk about basketball. But unless you actually spend a lot of time playing, you’re never going to learn to play basketball. To understand quantum computing, you absolutely must become fluent in the mathematical model.

Simulation of quantum systems

Atom Computing’s initial 100-qubit Phoenix machine and its next-generation 1,225-qubit platform are important milestones in its roadmap to build a fault-tolerant gate-based machine. So far, the company continues to hit its goal of scaling qubits by an order of magnitude in each generation. In addition to funding, the DARPA partnership provided Atom Computing with access to experts from the Defense Department, academia and national labs. Given that the company’s previous computer was roughly 5 feet (1.5 meters) across, shifting to 19-inch-wide (48.3-centimeter-wide) server cabinets required a significant redesign, says Chapman. In particular, the optical components at the heart of its device had to shrink considerably.

The best existing algorithms are incredibly computationally expensive, with a cost that rises exponentially with nnn. Even numbers with just a few hundred digits aren’t currently feasible to factor on classical computers. By contrast, Shor’s quantum factoring algorithm would make factoring into a comparatively easy task, if large-scale quantum computers can be built. There’s a tension here that applies to many proposals to do quantum information processing, not just neutrinos.