While most of the world has just about got to grips with basic
computing, D-Wave cofounder Eric Ladizinsky is trying to get to
grips with quantum computing.
"I'm very concerned about the future," he tells the audience at
WIRED2014 in London. "We are putting
enormous strains on our environments." Quantum computing is the the
next thing that will be able to change this, he believes.
Discovering new ways of harnessing nature has, throughout history,
always led to radical developments in our capabilities as humans.
And Ladizinsky thinks the next biggest revolution will be in
quantum computing.
Whenever there is a revolution in our civilisation -- whether
that's the discovery of fire, tool-making, agriculture or
electronic -- there is always a first revolution in the use of a
resource. However, at this time "we don't know how to manipulate it
in a detailed way". It means that it is always followed by a second
revolution -- a paradigm shift -- during which we learn to grapple
with the resource when its use has grown beyond our initial
understanding.
This is where we are with computing now, he believes. Classical
computing is capable of crunching enormous amounts of data, but,
explains Ladizinsky, "right now we're not necessarily able to
extract meaningful insights from that data on timescales that
matter". This is where quantum computing comes in.
Quantum has been around since the beginning of the twentieth
century and has been used to "explain everything that can't be
explained". It has given us "some of the strangest ideas humans
have ever encountered" -- the idea that physical objects can occupy
several different states simultaneously, for example.
Ladizinsky asks the audience to imagine that they had five
minutes to find an "X" he had written on a page of a book in the
Library of Congress. You wouldn't be able to do it, but if you were
in 50 million parallel realities, and in each you looked at several
pages each, you would be able to. This would be conditional of
course on you being able to collaborate with your other selves, in
order to do it in an organised way, ensuring that one of you
definitely came up with the right answer.
"We call talking to your other selves coherent evolution. If
they've all talked to each other, one of them will have come across
the answer. We can't do this as humans, but we can do this in the
lab now," he says. "It turns out the world we live in is a very
strange place. Physical systems can play out the possibilities
simultaneously, and those possibilities can talk to each
other."
While the point of quantum computing is that it can solve
mysteries beyond those that the human mind is capable of, building
a quantum computer itself is a mystery that is still being solved.
Ladizinsky works for the company D-Wave, which has already made
huge leaps towards this, developing technology that is now being
used to search for exoplanets, among other things. While the work
is far from over, Ladizinsky is hopeful.
"I think we're at a tipping point -- we've been on a Moore's
Law-like trajectory." It might not be long until quantum is at a
stage when it could prove itself "the unimaginable computing power
that might be realised in every section of science", he says.
Source Article from http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-10/16/eric-ladizinsky-d-wave-systems http://cdni.wired.co.uk/620x413/d_f/Eric-Ladizinsky-3-Michael-Newington-Gray
Why quantum computing will be civilisation's next big revolution
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