The Future of Quantum Computing - Prof. Seth Lloyd

the same questions I always ask myself are what does it all mean was it all about but in the context of science I'm interested in what the world is made of how the universe began where it's going and what can we do while we're around here and in my case that means studying quantum mechanics the theory of how things behave at their most fundamental level and now 25 years ago I started working on the problem of quantum computing which was how atoms and molecules photons elementary particles process information at that point there were only half a dozen people in the world looking at this problem and now there are thousands there goes the neighborhood so the devoman of any field that expands by so much so rapidly there are now all kinds of branches on this tree and there's still the branches of the kind of the fundamental questions of how we understand the world in terms of how it processes information interestingly right now there has been resurgence of interest in ideas of applying quantum mechanics to ideas and quantum information to ideas of quantum gravity and what the fundamental theory of the universe actually is turns out that quantum information has a lot to offer to people who are looking at problems of for instance what happens when you fall into a black hole and by the way my advice is don't do that if you can help it so if you fall into a black hole does any information about you ever escape from the black hole or not and these are questions that people like Stephen Hawking have been working on for decades and it turns out that quantum information has a lot to give to answer these questions then there are a lot of practical questions about understanding what's going on in nature for instance it's become clear over the last decade that in photosynthesis where particle blight comes into us from the Sun is absorbed by chlorophyll molecule the energy rattles around inside a leaf gets turned into more leaves photosynthesis is operating in a very quantum mechanical fashion and actually just exactly the same kinds of models that we use to look at quantum computation allow us to understand what's happening in photosynthesis turns out that the photosynthetic plants and bacteria and algae are extremely sophisticated in the way they use quantum mechanics they they use quantum coherence and funky effects like entanglement to get very very high efficiencies of energy transport basically my motto about this is okay if a little quantum hanky-panky will allow you to reproduce a little faster then by god you're going to use quantum hanky-panky and it turns out that that plants and bacteria and algae have been using quantum hanky-panky for a billion years to make their lives better um so indeed what's happening in quantum information in quantum computing is it it's become more and more clear that quantum information is kind of a universal language for how nature behaves a few years ago there was a centerfold in physics today the journal for physicists for the American Physical Society now it wasn't a very sexy centerfold it was a centerfold that had all the different parts of physics like you know high-energy physics and solid-state physics string theory mecan't physics of solid mechanics no nano physics and right in the middle they put quantum information and the reason was that this centerfold showed which parts of physics were talking with with which other parts of physics so who in this field was talking with this other field and they had to put quantum information right in the middle because everybody was talking with the people in quantum information so you know so physical chemistry which is or physical chemists are the people who study photosynthesis all of a sudden all the physical chemists were talking with people like me and we were doing experiments on you know plants and bacteria now we're actually doing artificial experiments where we try to make artificial in our case they are systems women and and virus made systems that mimic the high efficiency of energy transport and photosynthesis and in fact by using ideas from quantum information we've constructed systems that do much much better than even the most efficient naturally occurring system so and at the same time as there are all these theoretical developments there have been major advances in how you build devices that process information and building quantum computers so there's a company d-wave that builds these special-purpose quantum computers that are not general-purpose quantum computers that could you know break codes and strike fear into the heart of the NSA assuming of course the NSA has a heart and these systems are up and running and people are buying them and trying to figure out if they can solve hard problems faster than classical computers the jury is out on this question we don't know if they can or not at the same time people building superconducting systems and systems made of atoms or ions and optical systems have gotten much better at building quantum computers so we expect in the next five to ten years to have quantum computers which are large enough to do things no classical computer could ever do so this is actually a very exciting time in quantum computation for coming up with stuff to do with quantum computers there's am an old idea was originally due to richard fineman that you could use quantum computers to simulate other quantum systems kind of a quantum analog computer and then I wrote the first algorithms 25-year chart 20 years ago with the first algorithms for how you could program the quantum computers we have now to actually explore how other quantum systems behave and in the next few years we're going to have devices will allow us you know to build quantum mechanical simulations of say what happens inside a black hole we can look at what these models actually do but a few years ago some friends of mine and I used a small quantum computer to simulate what happens in the process of time-travel because the theory of time travel is intrinsically quantum mechanical and if you want to find out what happens when you send a photon a few billionths of a second backwards in time and have it tried to kill its former self well we have an experiment the test to see what happens when when you do that actually may say that in this case it's lucky that there's no Society for Prevention of Cruelty to photons because uh a lot of photons died in that experiment but it turned out the one photon that tried to kill itself in the past always failed because our quantum theory of time travel shows that you can't go back and do something self contradictory in the past like kill your former self one of the most fun applications of quantum computing right now mirrors what's happening classical computing so amongst the biggest advances in classical computing these days are programs for machine learning to take computers and have them process humongous amounts of data and figure out what the patterns are the NSA uses us to spy on us Google uses it to spy on us Amazon uses it to spy on us everybody uses on to spy on us well in in machine learning it's no secret we live in an era of big data human beings are generating Avogadro's number is worth of bits every every day or so and so and companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft are processing this data to try to find out every aspect of their life so they can Stella stuff and computers are getting very good at processing data and finding patterns in it so now quantum mechanical systems have this feature that they can generate patterns that's very hard for any classical system to generate and it also turns out that quantum computers can actually detect patterns that it's very hard for any classical computer to generate too sorry it also turns out that quantum computers can detect and identify patterns that are very hard for a classical computer to detect so for example if you have a huge data set like you know the tick by tick history of all the stocks on the Dow Jones for the last 50 years it's a big data set and you want to say well I'd like to process this to find out via what a good portfolio would be for me if I can tolerate a certain amount of risk and I want to have a certain amount of return well then with a pretty small quantum computer the kind that we're going to have in the next 5 years or so you could actually find the answer to that question much more accurately than you could do on a classical computer so um quantum computers work by storing and processing information at the most microscopic level so for instance if you have an electron you could call electron spinning up like this zero all electrons spinning like that one and you could call electrons spinning like that zero and one at the same time which is the primary feature of quantum computation a bit quantum bit or qubit can be 0 and 1 at the same time and this is where quantum computers gain their power over classical computers so for the last 20 years or more my colleagues and I have been working to build quantum computers using electrons using particles of light so you know a photon with its electric field wiggling like that is 0 photon with this electric field like that wiggling is wiggling like that as 1 for top of this electric field we're doing like that is 0 & 1 at the same time so we've been building these quantum computers in quantum communication systems I've been working I myself AM a theorist so the experimentalist don't like me to use a screwdriver in their lab because I tend to break things but I've been working closely with experimentalist for more than two decades now to build these devices they started off small with a couple of quantum bits but it turns out that just having a handful of quantum bits is enough to do good demos of the kinds of ideas of quantum computation and other quantum computers are getting a lot bigger so now we have tens of bits to have 50 bits and then we'll have 500 bits because now there's a clear path to how you build a larger scale quantum computer or classical computers famously obey Moore's law is not a law of nature it's just an observation about technological progress with the number of the size of the components and the computer gets smaller by a factor of two every couple of years the number of components doubles now quantum computers haven't been obeying a Moore's law the reason is that actually to build quantum bits and to put them together as a difficult process you're operating at the most microscopic scale it's tough to do you have to control things very very precisely and but there actually is a kind of a parallel Moore's law that goes along with the ordinary Moore's law in fact it's responsible for this which is that as time goes on we're getting better and better and better at controlling things at very microscopic scales and the same ability to control thing is allowing us to make more and more powerful quantum computers now our quantum computers are still piddling compared with a classical computer I mean I remember I had a classical computer that had 16 K of memory and you know and and then a few years later was 64 K of memory and you know now it's now it's like andra gigabytes of memory or a terabyte of memory but uh quantum computers have showed the stage where we just have a small number of bits 10 bits that we can use soon 50 bits that we can use 100 quantum bits that we can use still even though this is piddling by a comparison with a classical computer because quantum computers for specific problems are so much more powerful than classical computers this means it over the next five to ten years once we get up to something like you know few hundred quantum bits which is going to happen soon then we'll be able to solve problems you couldn't solve on a classical computer so what problems are we going to solve so a quantum computer with them say 500 quantum bits the kind we're going to see soon around the corner would not be able to factor large numbers break codes and strike fear in the heart 'less NSA but it would however be able to do some of these problems for instance like quantum machine learning finding patterns and large amounts of data last weekend I organized a conference on quantum machine learning at nips this gigantic machine learning conference in Montreal and we're expecting a few dozen people to show up and they're you know 150 people they could you couldn't get into the room because people an ordinary machine learning classical machine learning are always on the lookout for new ways of doing things and they were very surprised to find that kinds of machine learning problems like for instance looking at the topology of something figuring of the number of holes in a piece of data you know topology studies whether things have holes or gaps or wards or connected components these are features of the world that people who are analyzing data would really like to find but the classical algorithms have do this while effective are only effective on on you know very small numbers of holes for example because they just can't process that data by contrast with a small quantum computer even one with a few hundred quantum bits you'd be able to find complicated patterns and topological systems like holes and gaps and voids that you could never actually find classically so that's a we've really progressed to a new stage I mean the first 20 years of quantum computing were very interesting ideas from theory establishing connections with other branches of physics coming up with different algorithms that you would love to perform if you only had a quantum computer that was big enough to perform them and now we're on the brink of having quantum computers that are big enough to actually perform these kinds of analyses do simulations of other quantum systems of no class system could do fine patterns and data that no classical system could find so I think it's going to be very exciting time for quantum computation coming up so yeah so who has quantum computers right now well everybody's got quantum computers you know over at MIT there are you know five or six laboratories with quantum computers sitting in them and people are trying to expand them make them bigger there are hundreds of groups around the world that are building quantum computers yeah so so these quantum computers in these laboratories are pretty interesting I mean they look different according to what you're using so for instance a superconducting quantum computer whose quantum bits are super current going forever around this circuit in a clockwise fashion well that's a zero and super current going around the loop forever in a counterclockwise fashion that's a 1 and super current going around the loop in both directions at once which is kind of hard to imagine but that's what happens that's 0 & 1 at the same time so they're the actual devices themselves in the guts of the quantum computer is a chip it's a chip that's etched using relatively conventional technologies in which you H these little superconducting circuits then the chip itself then is connected to wires that come in from the outside world because it's superconducting it's got to sit inside a helium dilution refrigerator 15,000th of a degree above absolute zero so you've got this big thing that sits there looking like a beer keg going clickety click click click because it cools it down and then you talk to it using an ordinary computer so you let's type on your keyboard it sends signals under the chip chip processes those signals and then it does its weird quantum mechanical thing to get the answers up I mean these things are pretty large right now because actually really just because of the dilution refrigerator which contains it you wouldn't want to put it on your lap because it would squish you there sufficiently compact that you could actually just you know have them sitting in your office if you like for example there is a special-purpose kind of quantum computer a quantum annealer that's made by d-wave this is actually a commercial device bandim a number of people have bought them Lockheed Martin has bought a d-wave computer Google and NASA have bought them the Army is buying some of them and they're buying them because they're very interesting devices nobody understands exactly what's going on inside them they're doing things that are quite mysterious in their own quantum mechanical way because being mysterious is quantum mechanical thing and people are buying them to put them through their paces to see if maybe you could solve some hard problems on them that you couldn't solve on a classical device these devices this this d-wave device is actually based on a on a couple of papers that my graduate student bill Kaminski and i wrote in 2002 and we said hey you could like take a superconducting chip you could make a quantum annealer on it the special purpose quantum computer and here's how you do it and we then didn't patent it because we were idiots what could I say well we didn't patent it because we actually knew from a simple analysis of our theory that that this device wouldn't operate in the way that you wanted it to operate which is staying in its lowest energy state throughout the computation so like fools we didn't patent it the wave went along and built it they admit this freely why shouldn't they there's no patent and on then when they built it it was indeed true that it didn't behave in the way that you wanted it behaved staying in the lowest energy state throughout the computation got excited to higher energy levels but it still stalls the hard problems why is this nobody knows so I've been working with the folks at D wave to try to figure out why are they successful when they shouldn't be and ever since then I patent everything by the way even if I know whether it's going to work or not so another fun kind of quantum computer our quantum computers that rely on quantum optics on light now for many years these devices were massive because basically they consisted of a bunch of lasers big lasers sitting on an optical table covered with a million mirrors carefully aligned by graduate students to so that all the beams of light were going in just the right fashion and now there's been a really amazing development in in this particular field because based on techniques from telecommunications people now can put the whole thing on a chip so you take an optical table the size of a football field and you can pop the entire thing miniaturize it and pop the entire thing on a little chip this big and then the chip is etched with the lines of silicon and the photons go zooming along these little lines bounce into each other bounce all around interact with each other and then come out the other side so these are great devices and very fun to play with um one of the funky things about these devices is it's become clear over the last five or six years that even in some throw in some sense these devices should be very simple it's just light moving through a chip you know photons bouncing off mirrors and interacting with each other that their behavior can be very mysterious if you send you know 20 photons into these little ports going into the chip and you ask well what's the probability that they come out of these twenty other ports coming out of the chip this turns out to be extremely hard to calculate it classically nobody knows how to do it yet this chip can just do it automatically it can generate patterns who's who's these patterns nobody knows how you could possibly generate them on a classical computer if they have some kind of weird quantum feature that we can't generate just use even using the world's largest classical supercomputers one possibility for such devices for learning for instances a common feature of machine learning is a view of a device that can generate certain set of patterns then it can also recognize the same set of patterns so right now we're working on an experiment to try to see if we can make this happen can we have the patterns that are generated by one of these chips and then train another chip to recognize a set of patterns if we can do that then we'll trained a quantum device to recognize patterns that couldn't possibly be generated or recognized by a classical computer yeah we don't know we don't these patterns are so weird you know you look at them and they're of course because they can't be generated by any kind of classical object they're like nothing you've ever seen before by definition in addition to having these funky patterns that we have no idea what they are what they would be like how you generate them classically then quantum computers could you know do ordinary machine learning kinds of tasks like just recognizing large-scale patterns and data the kind of everyday thing that we now use all the time things like facial recognition voice recognition character recognition finding hidden patterns and data so trying to figure out for instance a very important question if you're investing in the stock market is is there some hidden dynamics that's driving all the stocks together in some pattern if you knew what that dynamics was then you could make a lot of money and the quantum computer could could find such patterns much more efficiently than a classical computer could so there plenty of kinds of ordinary kinds of problems were a quantum computer even a very small one with a few hundred quantum bits could actually do things that a classical computer couldn't and then they're the crazier things like these patterns you know that are generated these by these devices that are never generated classically I don't know what these patterns are good for in terms of recognizing them but they are very useful in terms of problems that involve cryptographic applications for example just encoding information in ways that nobody can actually decode because if you take your information you put it into one of these patterns you know you put it together with one of these patterns that nobody didn't can decode than by gum nobody can decrypt your information yeah it's it's useful to compare the current state of quantum computation and what's been going on with the last 20 years with what happened with digital computers over their first 20 years so the idea of building a digital computer was proposed in the mid 1930s by Claude Shannon annexes part of his master's thesis at Harvard was a very influential master's thesis by Konrad Zuse in and in Germany and the first devices started to be built them effectively in fact during the Second World War and by the mid 1950s then people had these gigantic extremely expensive devices there were very few of them they cost a lot to build it was a huge effort for a very small number of bits they break down all the time so the idea of building a quantum computer was something that I proposed in 1993 and quite soon after that people started building simple quantum computers and it's been tough to do just in the same way the first 20 years of building classical computers was tough and now we're at the stage where we have these quantum computers that fill rooms and have you know lab technicians and white posts tending to them they're hard to operate they break down and they still only have you know a few tens of quantum bits although of course we're making progress um andum so so what's interesting about this is you know there is with computers there is this if you build it they will come so the I have many senior colleagues at MIT who were participants in this early days of computation people like you know like Marvin Minsky Gallagher so and these when they tell me about you know the good old days first they're fond of doing one thing that comes across was the origins of computer science in the 1950s was tremendously exciting and there was a huge change as soon as they actually had a device that they could run their algorithm so on even a device that was you know a huge device physically but incredibly weak and puny by the compare with today's standards so pretty much as soon as people had developed the first computers where they could actually run programs on within a few years these pioneer computer scientists wasn't even called computer science at that point they'd actually developed many of the most powerful methods that we know today things like Monte Carlo simplex algorithm all these algorithms of people are now used for everything it was a tremendously exciting time and it was exciting because all of a sudden these really smart people who'd been kind of working in the realm of theory had a toy they could play with and very fast they came up with a huge number of fun games that they could play with this toy good pretty expensive toy but there were a lot of fun games they could play on that the field of quantum computing is in that stage right now we have these toys these you know simple or complex not so powerful quantum computers but we can play games on that and we can try out the things that people come up with and we can see what happens and people are coming up with very fun games as a result the field of quantum computing is tremendously exciting for someone like me because it's full of young people with fantastic ideas some of the most brilliant young scientists I know in the world have gravitated to this field because it's fun you can play awesome games the questions are big there you can ask questions about you know the nature of the universe you can ask questions about you know can I recognize a scroll 5 or 7 but then you can actually work with people as you can say hey I've got this idea can we try it out and you know we walk down the hallway at MIT and somebody says yes we can try that out let's see what happens so the field of quantum computing right now is a tremendously enjoyable place to be just from the point of view of intellectual play and you know I've fir meant for for me it's great because I get to work with these people who are hackable smarter than I am and that is a lot of fun to thinking about the future of quantum computing you know I have no idea if if we're going to have a quantum computer in every smartphone we have quantum apps for class it would allow us to communicate securely and find funky stuff using our quantum computers that's a tall order I think it very likely that we're going to have quantum micro processors in our computers and smart phones that are performing specific tasks this is simply for the reason that this is where the actual technology inside our devices is heading anyway and if there are advantages to be had from quantum mechanics then we'll take advantage of them just in the same way that you know in photosynthesis the stuff you know the energy is moving around in the quantum mechanical kind of way and if their advantages to be had from some quantum hanky-panky then you know quantum hanky-panky it is so of course it does you want to always ask for these technologies is it really worth it right you know is the internet worth it yeah probably it is on the other hand there's a you know there's a huge amount of stuff that's not worth it on the Internet is it a great thing to have a smart phone sure on certain occasions it is a lot of time it's just a distraction however that prevents you from paying attention to what's going on around you makes you run into lampposts while you're texting as a professor at MIT and I'm a professor of mechanical engineering quantum mechanical engineering I'm exposed to novel technologies all the time most of them you know super cool technologies that will never be turned into something that people will be used but they're super cool nonetheless and the strategy I've learned with this is you know there's a huge number of technologies out there and you just don't have to adapt them you have to or adopt them you don't have to adopt these technologies you you can you don't have to use it you can use the ones that you like you cannot use the ones that you don't like so for example you know I actually I don't use Facebook or Twitter or or other social media because I feel that you know there's there's there's there's presence and then there's absence and then there's cyber presence and cyber presence is a heck of a lot closer to absence that it is to actual presence similarly when I look at you know my parents and their friends they have friends who are people whom they go and visit they go stay overnight they have dinner together they talk with them and you know that's what a friend is and maybe some of your friends on Facebook are friends like this but probably not most so I think you know most of the things that make human life life rich and rewarding are just about being human and not about technologies no if we're lucky we can find a technology that helps us understand what's going on better or useful for certain purposes and that's great we should use those of course a lot of these technologies get used for you know for bad sloppy annoying purposes as well in general I would say that you know that the that if we're lucky with the technology if you like here are the good things here are the bad things and the average is just a little better than you know zero that's good technology is not neutral I mean in fact one of the primary uses of technology just very naturally in the way that the economy works is that wealthy and powerful corporations use technology to exploit ordinary people um there's some I've experienced this a lot of just into my own job you know when I I started off as a scientist I you know I I I would write by - most of my time calculating by hand and you know writing formulas on blackboards and what I wanted to write a paper I would maybe type it up or write it out by hand and I I'd give it to someone who would type it and then it would go to a journal and there'd be a typesetter at the journal the journal would type in a very skilled job to typeset scientific equations the jour the typesetter would sites up these taught scientific equations and now what happens is when I submit a paper to the journal I have to typeset it myself I mean this very nice program called tack relay tech that allow to to typeset scientific equations but it takes a lot of work I'm spending a lot more time right enough to write a paper I spend a lot more time than I did in the past and a bunch of other people lost their jobs yeah well this is you know this is and one of the very natural things about technology is that that this at the same time it takes make some jobs more efficient and easier to do it means that the people are actually doing them end up having more work because you know your employer is making you do more stuff and then there a bunch of other people out there who are out of a job so it's not technology is not neutral and I mean it can make things more efficient but it doesn't necessarily make our lives easier or better fact it often makes a lot of us work a lot harder which I object to well I just I I find its easiest to tell people the truth about what's going on and that's good for them too there are a number of fortune 500 companies that are investing heavily in quantum computing iBM has always been heavily invested in quantum computing Microsoft Google now Intel is investing and is making a very significant investment in quantum computing NEC in Japan as a big investment in quantum computing so there are quite a few companies that have decided they want to invest in in this field and know when they ask me ok you know are we going to have a quantum computer that we can build and sell to people soon I say well maybe not though actually were much closer now and in fact I think it quite likely with these new advances and the technology is particularly of things like superconducting quantum computing and atom optical quantum computing that we will have quantum computers that people can build and they might be able to sell but there's um I think a very good reason for such a company a company like Google or IBM or Microsoft or Intel to invest in quantum computing and that is this is a technology that has tremendous promise even though at the moment it's not something that you know is incorporated in everyday smartphone and the reason has to do with the nature of computing in general and when people first built these humongous computers you know the size of a gymnasium and put them in gymnasiums they really didn't have the slightest clue about what computers would be used for and um and they were thinking I will do it you know to analyze things like shell trajectories you know some material properties and things like this but one thing that that we've all experienced over the last few decades is that computers can do things that you would never thought they would been able to do and moreover information processing technologies have exploded in a way that nobody would ever have expected so now it really doesn't make sense to just talk about computers because everything is computing I mean your smartphone is a tremendously powerful computer your car engine contains you know 20 to 50 micro processors that are computing way all the time and this is the secret for actually getting much better fuel efficiency with pollution controls etc it also turns out to be the secret to cheating on pollution controls so computation is present and information processing is in present in a huge number of devices and you know it's this notion that that almost anything you touch is capable of processing information in a sophisticated fashion this is now a commonplace so so if you're a company that deals with questions of information processing then it's very important for you to know what's going on so places like for instance IBM's very long term investment quantum computing they've been strongly invested in quantum computing from the beginning basically for more than two decades that comes because they had very good people who were amongst the founders of the field who were developing in Laughlin Darin Charlie Bennett and it was clear that that really amazing things would come out of this so it's not like they're investing you know a billion dollars in quantum computing but they're investing tens of millions of dollars a year I don't know what their actual investment and as a result they have some of the best and brightest people who were in the world who were working with them who are coming up with the ideas who know what's going on who are playing with their own quantum computers at their building the same is true of all these other companies there are fantastic places for young people to work again there are some of the main places where new ideas are being developed DARPA has always had a close relationship with with quantum information processing by its very nature program managers at DARPA are always wanting to you know hit it out of the park and it's been clear from the beginning the quantum computing is a potentially technology where you could hit it out of the park I was part of the I was a co principal investigator on the first the first quantum computing grant from the government which came from DARPA back in 1994 Jeff Kimball was a leader of this group and you know they've DARPA realized right away this is something that they could look at and in fact over the last 20 years there have been a wide variety of programs of DARPA investigating different aspects of quantum computation many of them very successful I think a lot of the the fundamental advances in quantum computing have ended up being funded by DARPA in one form or another it's not always you know as usual with DARPA this is I regard this is a good thing I'm not sure if the head of DARPA regards is a good thing frequently what ends up being developed by a particular program is not what they set out to do in the beginning and it but it turns out that there's some spin-off that comes out of this program that is tremendously powerful for example DARPA was the first funding agency to recognize that this role of quantum mechanics and photosynthesis was a very important thing and they created the first program to fund looking at funky effects like quantum coherence and entanglement in photosynthesis and an energy transport it was a very successful program that had wonderful results for men and you know right now with the some of the spin-offs that came off that I'm working on right now are these man and woman and virus made systems that are much more efficient in their energy transport than anything that's found in nature so yeah I mean DARPA has a finger of his fingers and many pies and it's got its fingers and many quantum pies and it's been part of developing many of the offender fundamental ideas in quantum computing and in fact when I are spun off of DARPA I are Paul has also taken a major role in investing in the forefront of quantum information processing because it's growing so rapidly because it has impact on so many other fields there are now a lot of subfields in quantum computation and quantum information processing there are the techie guys who are building quantum computers and of these are some really remarkable people out there in superconducting quantum computers John Martinez who has just been hired by Google my colleague will Oliver at MIT the group at Delft then there are people who are looking at wild-eyed and crazy ideas about what kinds of new quantum algorithms you could come up with Scott Aaronson my colleague at MIT the famous blog poster on gentle optimized his he is a he has a remarkable set of ideas and he and his colleagues are mapping out the set of questions that you might be able to solve on quantum computers and doing a wonderful job in doing in one of the most successful and powerful types of devices you can make for to build a quantum computer on earth using ion traps where you take a bunch of ions atoms you strip electrons off you trap them in a little trap zap them with lasers my colleague Chris Monroe at University of Maryland as a pioneer in this field reiner blot at the University of Innsbruck has done amazing things on this my colleague Ike Shuang at MIT - has done have made lots of progress on building these devices then I always my favorite part about quantum information is the kind of wild and crazy stuff where we say hey let's understand how the universe is made and how its put together from thinking about it in terms of a lot of information so thinking about quantum gravity which something nobody understands in terms of quantum information is something I've been doing now for fifteen or twenty years and now there are quite a few people working on this it's quite fun um John Prescott at a senior people include John Prescott at UH at Caltech and Alexey Kataya for who's a MacArthur prize winner they're both brilliant people making great strides in this regard what as I said one of the things that characterizes the field of quantum information is the is the tremendous quality amongst the younger researchers in the field Patrick Hayden who's just been hired at Stanford exactly to look at questions of you know quantum mechanics in quantum gravity on a Bryan Swingle who came up with one of the main connections between quantum gravity and quantum information when he was a graduate student at MIT almost lonesome let's face it the guy is brilliant what can I say China is a bit of a late comer to the quantum information game though they have about four years ago they established an Institute for looking at quantum computing at Ching Wong and this is an excellent Institute and they they're doing great things and there have always been some wonderful individual experimentalists in China doing quantum information like pong for example Singapore has an amazing program in quantum information processing at the National University of Singapore it's one of the leaders in the field there are many fantastic researchers in Japan on quantum information my colleague yes or no vote excuse me my colleague yasunobu Nakamura and groups at Tokyo Institute of Technology and he sees had always a great group there and there are many great people there the largest group of collection of people you know concentration of people working on quantum computation are actually in Canada at the Institute for quantum computing in Waterloo where Mike Lazaridis the founder of black brewery has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to as seed funds to create a remarkable group of researchers of headed by Ramon Laflamme and this is in some sense the you know this is the the biggest concentration in the world these days you know there many fantastic quantum groups in Europe the University of Vienna has amazing people on tons Islanders haven't been there for a long time for the fall term they're the Oxford and Cambridge have great programs with blood-covered all at Oxford which for josa Cambridge oh and of course David Deutsch at Oxford is you know founder of the field though it's difficult to see him because he only goes out at night yeah yeah I I've had many conversations with David Deutsch over the years one of the most fun conversations was when I was running a session at a conference at MIT and David was appearing by a video lake and I was in this gigantic auditorium with a 40-foot tall screen in front of me and I was seated in the front row of the auditorium and David's 40 foot Paul head was talking to me from the screen there was nobody else in the room and we were just talking about physics it was like talking with The Wizard of Oz David is a brilliant person and a deep thinker I don't really need to say but it but it is true you know he he was the first person to realize that that quantum computers could do something really fundamental that possible computers couldn't and it's interesting he realized they're simply in the mid-1980s and it took him a long time actually to come up with an example of something where a quantum computer could do better um he had this intuition he came up with the kind of formal notion of quant computer but for about more than five years or so he couldn't come up with a night something work do better and then when he finally came up with something he showed well here's something where a a classical computer takes two or three steps on average to do this problem and a quantum computer can do it in one so even that wasn't you know it was in advance but it wasn't you know a problem that anybody would like to solve but he was so fixed on the idea of coming up with the idea and figuring out what you could do that in the end he kind of by sheer force of intellect and willpower brought the community around to realize this was an important thing and then so other people started working on this and coming up with ideas that could be more useful the quantum Fourier transform defines periods and functions and then Peter shor uses to come up with his famous algorithm for factoring numbers and breaking comets and then it was off to the races now during the last two decades since in the kind of you know the Renaissance of want of computing since Shor's algorithm in 1994 you know it's gone from a half-dozen people in the field to thousands of people in the field working on a vast variety of things during this entire time david has you know stuck by his own lights and he's continued to work on what he regards as the most important things for the last 10 years he's been working on what he calls a quantum constructor theory where so far as I can tell and I can't say that I understand it very well he's trying to derive the varied nature of reality from ideas based on quantum computing I bet wish him good luck in doing so

Channel: The Artificial Intelligence Channel

Views: 65,412

Rating: 4.7986579 out of 5

Keywords: singularity, ai, artificial intelligence, deep learning, machine learning, immortality, anti aging, deepmind, robots, robotics, self-driving cars, driverless cars, Quantum Computing, Seth Lloyd

Id: 5xW49CzjhgI

Length: 48min 12sec (2892 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 02 2018