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General purpose quantum computing closer to reality with Microsoft breakthroughs

news.microsoft.com

34 points by hexrcs 8 years ago · 13 comments

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ColanR 8 years ago

> Craig Mundie, who as Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer first backed Freedman’s push into quantum computing a dozen years ago, noted that if a quantum computer could hypothetically process a training algorithm for the Cortana digital assistant in a day rather than a month, that would mark a profound improvement in AI advances.

I didn't think that quantum computing would help with DNN or parallel processing...what gives?

  • SomeStupidPoint 8 years ago

    One of the people mentioned in the article, Svore, works at the QuArC group for MS and has worked on quantum machine learning. (QuArC generally works on how to actually design and use quantum computers.)

    For example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.3489.pdf

    From my (shallow) understanding, you can get improvements by considering the space of possible states of your quantum system to be the space of weights for your model, and then annealing the quantum system (which is equivalent to optimizing the objective function). The quantum annealing is a (significant) improvement over other optimization methods... or something.

  • maxander 8 years ago

    My (admittedly fuzzy) understanding is that while running a DNN is a very parallel problem, training it (back-propagation, in particular) is not and is thought to be susceptible to quantum speedup. Google's work in quantum computing is motivated by the same application.

  • iamcasen 8 years ago

    It entirely depends on the problem being solved. I am not sure what their ideas are with machine learning, but essentially quantum computers help with parallelization with algorithms that can take advantage of superpositions.

  • martinquantum 8 years ago

    I think that for pattern matching (DNN) it's not clear, but for parallel stuff the quantum computer is like the ultimate SIMD machine.

manuelelucchi 8 years ago

What about the quantum programming language? Q#? The extension is .qb so i think not... What do you think?

lostmsu 8 years ago

Here, saved you time on reading 3 pages of bloat.

> A new programming language that is designed for developers to create apps to debug on quantum simulators today and run on an actual topological quantum computer in the future.

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