Google’s Quantum Computer is 100 Million Times Faster

Quantum mechanics is a topic most engineering students hate to study. The idea is that everything we have learnt about physics and chemistry changes completely when we come down to the atomic and molecular level.

For years, scientists have been trying to develop a computer that runs on the principles of quantum mechanics, but without much success. However, today, all this changes. In partnership with NASA, Google has developed its own quantum computer that can run 100 million times faster than the computers of today.

The first-ever idea of a quantum computer was proposed by British physicist David Deutsch in 1985. A classical computer (computers of today) holds information, called ‘bits’, in small transistors. The bits can be either ‘0’ or ‘1’ (binary logic), with ‘0’ implying that the state is ‘off’, and ‘1’ implying that the state is ‘on’. All computers which exist today operate using binary logic.

In a quantum computer, the machine stores information in a ‘qubit’ (quantum bit). It can store both ‘0’ and ‘1’ simultaneously. Two qubits can hold 00, 01, 10 and 11. Since a qubit can hold multiple values at the same time, theoretically, this increases the computing power exponentially.

A Canadian computer research company called D-Wave started building the first quantum computer in 2010 based on research work done at MIT. In 2013, Google and NASA purchased one of these machines.

The D-Wave 2X (a newer model) has over 1,000 superconducting circuits that enable flowing current. The qubits are tiny particles held in magnetized states at temperatures of near absolute zero. At this temperature, the circuits enter into a quantum state where current flows both clockwise and anti-clockwise at the same time. The machine then operates on these qubits and determines the probability of specific circuits to exhibit a particular state when temperature is raised.

When researchers ran tests of various algorithms on standard computers and tried to execute the same tests on quantum machines, a difference of 100 Million in computing power was realized.

“That’s an impressive figure, but we're not quite in the age of quantum computing just yet. While these results are intriguing and very encouraging, there is more work ahead to turn quantum enhanced optimization into a practical technology,” said Hartmut Neven of Google.

D-Wave has sold its machines to the likes of Lockheed Martin and the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Microsoft believes the first working quantum computer will be available by 2025. It is clear that although not fully adaptable in modern computing, the D-Wave 2X is a necessary first step to revolutionize computing forever.