Classical computers can do amazing things – our lives, implicitly, and explicitly, revolve around them. Providing power to our pockets, thereby compressing computation of what was the size of an entire room 50 years ago, we’ve made phenomenal strides in technology. But we’re yet to achieve supremacy in the field of computing.

Physicists since the early 1990’s have envisioned a ‘Quantum Computer’ – the dream machine with unfathomable processing power at lightening speed, cutting down energy consumed by our current computers by a factor of a million. This ultra-powerful machine has the potential to disrupt everything from science and medicine to climate change, business and national security to space exploration.

So how do Quantum computers really do it? Ever imagined tossing a coin and arriving at a result that’s both head and tails? Quantum mechanics states that particles can be in two places at once and this state of superposition, allows quantum computers to represent one or a zero at the same time, using “qubits”, thereby significantly reducing the time taken to crunch data. This is a phenomenal leap over the way classical computers work – which have to test each possible binary state before moving on to the next one.

All of this may seem like a quantum leap into a sci-fi realm. However, the QuTech project at Delft University, funded by Google, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft, among others, is closer than ever to making this dream a reality. The head of Google’s quantum computing effort, Harmut Neven, says his team is on target to build a 49-qubit system by as soon as a year from now, which is likely to have commercial value in the next two to five years, thereby achieving quantum supremacy.

This long heralded thunderbolt of a technology with its giddy predictions of busted crypto and multiverse calculations make this lusty dream seem worth the wait. What are the implications you can think of for this mindblowing tech? And how long do you think it will be before the use of quantum technology becomes commercially viable?

Sources:
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/603495/10-breakthrough-technologies-2017-practical-quantum-computers/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/10/10/15-things-everyone-should-know-about-quantum-computing/#eb18a331f73a
http://www.economist.com/node/526208
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/05/02/dream-machine
https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2017/07/04/what-is-quantum-computing-a-super-easy-explanation-for-anyone/#7cc90e6d1d3b

The defeat of 18-time Go World Champion, Lee Sedol, in March 2016, by AlphaGo (AG) marked a landmark achievement in the domain of Artificial Intelligence because the complexity of this ancient Chinese board game and the level of reaction and intuition required, proved it hard for computers to master, up until then.
A year has passed and Deepmind, Google’s AI group has yet another surprise up its sleeve. Christened ‘Alpha Go Zero’ (AGZ), an AI unimaginably powerful, it derived thousands of years of human Go knowledge from scratch, before inventing better moves of its own, all in the space of three days, simply by playing itself.

Despite having the superior advantage of learning from previously played Go games, AG couldn’t muster a single win in the 100 match game against the newly incarnated and improved version of itself. Using ‘reinforcement learning’, the leaner and meaner AI, with nothing but the rules of the game to its name, played itself over and over again, starting from random play and without any supervision or use of human data. Ordaining itself as its own teacher and learning purely from experience, it prided on discovering winning strategies all by itself thereby refining and getting better at its own game.
We’re moving farther away from training a model to imitate the human data we feed it and are instead looking at a model free from human bias and presuppositions. This goal-oriented learning system is able to derive more nuanced optimal conceptions that we’d take an inordinate amount of time for.
AGZ has baffled us by surpassing our mental capacity, arriving at results experts possibly can’t even fathom. The full gamut of possibilities for how an intelligence might behave is simply too vast to be constrained in any meaningful manner. And if we can’t arrive at a principled and scientific account of the how and why, will we ever have control over this smarter-than-human-intelligence supernova?

Source: https://gizmodo.com/stunning-ai-breakthrough-takes-us-one-step-closer-to-th-1819650084