Saturday, September 6, 2014

"The Man Who Will Build Google’s Elusive Quantum Computer" (GOOG)

From Wired:

John Martinis is one of the world’s foremost experts on quantum computing, a growing field of science that aims to process information at super high speeds using strange physics of very tiny particles such as electrons and photons. And now, after years as a physics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, he’s headed for Google.

This week, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab announced that it hired Martinis and his Santa Barbara team to build a new breed of quantum computing hardware. Though Martinis will maintain his affiliation with UC Santa Barbara and continue to mentor his PhD students there, he will spend most of his time on his research at Google. The move proves that Google is serious about quantum computing, and given the company’s vast influence and deep pockets, it could provide a serious shot in the arm for quantum computer research as a whole.
Google launched its Quantum A.I. Lab last year to test a machine called the D-Wave Two, an intriguing but controversial system that its makers bill as a quantum computer, and it believes quantum computing could play a key role in so many of its future ambitions, from self-driving cars and other robots to better predictive analytics systems for products like Google Now to things we haven’t even dreamed up yet. Thanks to what’s called the superposition principle of quantum mechanics, it could process data for such projects at speeds that are exponentially faster than what you get from today’s machines.

But the scientific community has greeted the D-Wave machine with skepticism, questioning whether the machine is actually a quantum computer at all, and whether it can actually provide something you can’t get from conventional machines. In joining Google, Martinis lends new weight to the company’s quantum ambitions.

Beyond the D-Wave
Martinis is among those questioning D-Wave’s claims. Last June, Science published a paper co-authored by Martinis and several other scientists concluding that D-Wave’s machines aren’t actually faster than normal laptops and desktops. But he’s no D-Wave hater. Martinis has been working with D-Wave’s machines for a few years now and says he has long been impressed with the work the company has done.

The general consensus now, he says, is that the D-Wave computers do exhibit some quantum behavior. The real question, he explains, is whether this behavior actually speeds up the D-Wave computers. And although his team will be working separately from D-Wave at Google, he thinks their work may eventually help D-Wave take better of advantage of that quantum behavior. “We’re taking some of the basic ideas of D-Wave and combining that with what the [Google] Quantum AI team has learned operating the machine,” he says....MORE