Quantum computers - a revolution in the making | Shai Machnes | TEDxSavyon

[Music] [Applause] imagine the world in the year 2040 thousands of square kilometers of the Sahara Desert are covered by solar panels the electricity is then carried by superconducting wires all over the globe where it simply circulates until needed this was made possible by wondrous new material it's a room-temperature superconductor discovered using quantum computers you see before we had quantum computers when we wanted to find new materials we just had to synthesize them in the lab one after another and test their properties this was a very long and arduous process but with quantum computers everything accelerated a thousand times because instead of synthesizing the materials we can simply simulate them we can test their properties in simulation and work that used to take a year we can now do in a single afternoon so quantum computers may help us solve the crime at the climate crisis and the energy crisis the scenario I just described is just one of many things we are likely to see from quantum computers and quantum technology in fact in the next 30 years many aspects of our lives will be affected by this new technology as much as it has been affected by regular computers to date medicine chemistry physics artificial intelligence finance you name it and today what I want to do is tell you a little bit about quantum computers and this revolution in the making but first some introductions hi i'm shy' Magnus I'm a physicist and I build quantum computers of course I don't do this alone I do this me with my colleagues here this is the open super Q EU Research Project and we are part of a larger community of about 5,000 scientists and engineers trying to tackle this problem now before I can tell you about quantum computers I need to tell you something about quantum physics so what is quantum physics quantum physics deals with the smallest elements of nature electrons protons atoms molecules stuff like that and it turns out that the rules down there of the very small are very very different than what we're used to up here in the macroscopic world specifically very small particles can be in more than one place at the same time and I mean really be in more than one place at the same time this is not a euphemism this is not a statement about ignorance or something in statistics really actually an electron can be in multiple places at the same time now what does this have to do with quantum computers well with regular computers we have a bit it's either 0 or 1 the electron is either here or there but with quantum computers we makes extensive use of this property to be in multiple positions which we call superposition we utilize the superposition to make something we call qubits quantum bits that can be both 0 and 1 at the same time now what happens if you insist and you want to measure whether the electron is here or there well then something strange happens the electron stops being in a superposition the superposition collapses and it becomes a regular boring bit it's either 0 or 1 now ok but which one because it was both before well now it gets even weirder because the process appears to be random and this is what Einstein famously objected to when he said that God doesn't play dice with the universe but as Niels Bohr reminded him even Einstein doesn't tell god what to do and the process is indeed apparently random now to be quite honest we physicists don't quite understand what happens when a superposition collapses this is something to do with how the quantum particle interacts with the measurement device and there are lots of ideas what could happen there personally I subscribe to the average many world interpretation which says that for all practical purposes every time you have this collapse universe splits into two parallel universes one in which the bit is zero and one in which the bit is one now regardless of how this mystery of the collapse will get solved eventually for us the people that build quantum computers this is a stuff of nightmares because midway through our quantum computation our quantum bit which was both 0 and 1 suddenly becomes a regular boring bit 0 or 1 so we have to put in a lot of effort to prevent this from happening and the number one thing we can do is cool down our computer now if outer space is about 3 or 4 degrees above absolute zero we cool our quantum computers a hundred times more to a few hundreds of a degrees above absolute zero and I'll tell you in a bit how we actually get that done ok so let's say we managed to beat collapse or at least suppress it what can we do well we can start having fun we can have more than one human so let's say we have two and we set them up in this superposition either they're both 0 or they're both 1 okay so we have superposition but we also have correlation because if you know what one qubit is then you know what the other is and then we'll do the following really thing we'll take one of these cubits and leave it here on earth and send the other electron to the Andromeda galaxy millions of light-years away now we know previously that if we measure either of the qubits we will get either 0 or 1 now the truly amazing thing is that quantum physics guarantees that the other qubit will give us exactly the same measurement result so we have a process that's both random and correlated and it can be correlated from two edges of the universe this is what Einstein referred to as spooky action at a distance this is the basis for stuff like quantum teleportation and quantum cryptography now you can ask me like shy how does any of this make sense this sounds complete nonsense and I'll say well sorry but that's just the way the universe works I mean nature doesn't owe us to make sense certainly not we're big monkey brains right nature is the way she is it's our job to learn how nature works and just deal with it ok now let's recap we have a superposition superposition is the ability for a quantum particle to be in more than one place at the same time it can be both 0 and 1 we have the thing that keeps me worried at night which is the collapse of the superposition and we have entanglement entanglement is the combination of superposition and correlation and I think now you can start understanding why quantum computers are so different than regular computers quantum computers are actually machines to generate entanglement to suppress collapse and to manipulate these things very very precisely and regular computers just shuffle zeros and ones around by way of analogy if a regular computer is a car a quantum computer is a it you want to go to the supermarket to get some milk you take a car you want to settle Mars you take a rocket and no matter how fast your car is it will never get you to Mars right so similarly if you want your Excel spreadsheet to run faster then you get the new chip from AMD but if you want to design a material that's as clear as glass but as strong as steel you use a quantum computer ok now I'll tell you something that's even more amazing if we have if we have a quantum computer that has 300 quantum bits three hundred qubits it'll have more memory capacity than the number of atoms in the entire universe now make this a bit clearer let's say you were capable of building a regular computer where every atom is one bit okay and you took every atom in the universe every planet every star every galaxy and you took all the universe to build this regular computer it will still not be able to simulate what a quantum computer with three hundred qubits will be able to do and we are very likely to have this within ten years and how do I know because just two months ago right in October 19 Gogol achieved what is known as quantum supremacy they built a quantum computer with 54 qubits one of the qubits didn't works or they're left with 53 and the calculation they performed using this quantum computer is something that is more than the largest supercomputer in the world can replicate again a quantum computer has past tense outstripped the capability of the world's largest supercomputer this is science fact not science fiction and this is the new world in which we're going to live okay now how does the quantum computer actually look well this is a small qpu quantum CPU okay it has only two qubits it's part of the open super cube project they're little square in the middle is the quantum part when it's cold enough and the circular things around the edges is where we connect the wires now as I mentioned previously we have to cool this down to do that we connect it to this very weird chandelier you see behind me the chip goes at the cylinder at the bottom and all the weird wires are coming from the warm outside all the way down to the very very cold chip at the bottom now how do we call this well that's actually very simple we just buy a fridge yeah it's an expensive fridge it costs a million dollars or something but you can actually go to a company and buy a fridge like this and this is what it looks like okay this is from IBM labs it's essentially a series of thermos flasks one inside the other with some liquid helium and it just works okay so this is what a quantum computer looks like now if you look at this picture it may look a little bit clunky right there are pipes and wires running and all sort of stuff like that and you'd be right because in many respects we are in the 1950s of quantum computation okay our quantum computers are cumbersome and they're error-prone and they're slow right we're just getting started now in the 1950s engineers used them to do some kind of scientific type calculations but it was 25 years before computers became ubiquitous and it was another 50 years before they revolutionized society similarly quantum computers will take time but because this is the 21st century everything works a little bit faster another point to remember is that in the 1950s they couldn't imagine Facebook and they couldn't imagine fortnight and they couldn't imagine so our ideas of what we could do with quantum computers today are probably kind of a little bit off but there are a few things we know okay the first thing we can do is we can understand very complex molecules such as proteins and how they fold if we can do that we can design better medication better drugs that will help us live better and longer another thing we can do is understand chemical processes in a very detailed manner this will help us improve a lot of the chemical industry for example there is a chemical process called the haber-bosch process which is responsible for most of the fertilizer in the world but it's very expensive energetically with quantum computers we are likely to find a way of doing it cheaper and that'll help poor countries feed themselves quantum computers will completely revolutionize material science we'll be able to find new materials with exciting properties like the super conducting the room-temperature superconducting material I talked about in the beginning and quantum computers will help us train the next next generation artificial intelligent systems whether that is a good or bad thing I leave to you now because of the huge potential of quantum computers this has begun something of an international race so every large tech company Google IBM Intel Microsoft Holly Alibaba etc etc they're all have large groups working on this similarly Research Projects research budgets in the EU in China in the u.s. they're all in the billions and growing even companies like Daimler are using the small quantum computers we have today to research chemistry for batteries for electric vehicles and Goldman Sachs is already using quantum computers to try and research how to optimize option portfolios and there are tons and tons of startups like mushroom after the rain okay the the environment right now is sort of a mix between the 1950's arms race and 1960's moon race in the 1990s internet Gold Rush okay so what can you do about it how does it relate to you well if you know a little bit of programming you can probably program a quantum computer today iBM has made a 5 cubed quantum computer available for free online just Google IBM quantum experience there's a web interface tutorials videos everything you need it's a lot of fun if you want to program quantum computers more seriously then you'll need to do about a couple of university level courses one about math and one about quantum programming and again everything is available free online if you actually want to help design the next generation quantum computer then you really need to know the physics and that means a PhD now if you're running a big company or looking for investment opportunities keep your eyes open for quantum technology specifically quantum sensing and quantum communication these will be coming online within three to five years and then looking a bit further five to ten years you'll see quantum computer starting to be used in chemistry and material science and finally if you're in charge of encryption and communication security I'll start looking into switching out the regular RSA cipher with something that is quantum proof okay this is the practical stuff but beyond that quantum physics and quantum computers are weird and they're great and they're great because they're weird and there's a lot of material online from videos in youtubes and books and websites and whatever you want you can learn a lot more about it so just be curious and be prepared for a future that's a lot more interesting and a lot more quantum then you previously expected thank you you

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 121,796

Rating: 4.8936467 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Technology, Computers, Engineering, Invention, Physics, Science

Id: eVjMq7HlwCc

Length: 17min 47sec (1067 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 12 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/shaim2]

I'm Shai Machnes (the speaker in the video).

I'll do my best to answer any questions.

[u/galexj9]

In your example of entanglement, as I poorly understand it, the electrons are both in superpositions but when measured will always perfectly predict the other.

If that's the case then shouldn't the information of the electrons' collapsed positions already somehow be encoded in the superpositions?

[u/sobapi]

Hi Shai, great talk!

There seems to be very little "buzz" about Quantum sensors… but you mentioned that quantum sensors and quantum communication would be ready before quantum computers... who or which organizations should we follow to learn more about quantum sensors?

Would have you have any guesses when Quantum computers will be able to break RSA encryption?

A lot of the start ups I see today are filled with PhDs... I have seen some start ups that are essentially just "programmers for hire", if you wanted to build a start-up this year or next year, which areas do you think have the most promise?

[u/galexj9]

How is it that quantum computers are better able to simulate AIs? And will quantum computers accelerate the training as well?

[u/psyjg8]

Brilliant talk!

As someone doing some research in this subject at the minute, can I ask what made you believe the MW interpretation, as opposed to Copenhagen?

It'd be great if you could provide some content that lead you to the conclusion too!

Also, what are your thoughts on whether Google's Sycamore really achieved quantum supremacy, given that (as I understand it) they built the machine solely to solve a single algorithm?