This week, Google made an announcement of a machine in the works that is 100,000,000 times faster than laptops, and it's reportedly using quantum computing to do so.
The D-Wave 2X is Google's 1,000-qubit computer that can supposedly solve carefully crafted test problems 100 million times faster than any classical computer would, says Popular Science. Quantum computing is a venture currently being pursued by organisations such as Google, NASA, and Lockheed Martin.
The applications of a machine with such a speed could revolutionize the way artificial intelligence, materials science and space exploration are done. Rupak Biswas, director of exploration technology at NASA's Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California, says that the area of quantum computing is a disruptive technology that could "change how we do everything, says Technology Review.
While Google claims that the D-Wave is at a working rate, Gizmodo notes that not everyone is convinced that it is a working quantum computer. Purchased back in 2013, the device is also supposed to be 3,600 times faster than a supercomputer.
As the team from Google has published results on the arXiv server that claim to demonstrate computing done at a quantum level, results showed that the computer used is known as, quantum annealing, to process information.
As convincing as it may seem, there is still some verification to be done, including peer-reviewing the research and checking if the regular computer was using the most optimal algorithm it could.
While some scientists move to debate and debunk the possibility of the D-Wave 2X truly using quantum mechanics to analyze data, Microsoft and IBM have joined forces with Google in the race to crack the quantum computing code. Microsoft says that it could be possible to see a quantum computing machine in the next ten years, although, D-wave maintains that the hardware is already there.
Join the Conversation