Last year when officials working on the joint quantum computing effort between NASA and Google announced that their partnership had achieved quantum supremacy, the big question was not so much if quantum computing would continue to advance, but what the government could do with all that new computing power. While quantum supremacy is an important milestone, it doesn’t really have any practical value by itself. The real goal will be using quantum computing to enhance or even supercharge other efforts.
Quantum supremacy, as defined in 2012 by a professor of theoretical physics named John Preskill, occurs when a quantum system is able to solve a problem that no traditional computer is capable of within a reasonable amount of time. He later clarified that definition further and also agreed that the NASA and Google partnership had in fact achieved quantum supremacy.
There is some controversy as to whether the NASA/Google quantum computer partnership gamed the system a little bit, creating a problem that specifically played to the strengths of quantum machines and the weaknesses of traditional computing architectures. There was even disagreement as to how long a supercomputer would take to solve the unique problem used in the supremacy test, with Google saying it would take 10,000 years, while rival IBM said it could be solved on one of their supercomputers in about two days.
But for the sake of argument, let’s assume that quantum supremacy was achieved. Just like for a dog that finally catches one of those cars that it’s always been chasing, the question then becomes, what do we do now? Certainly, we will continue to improve the speed and especially the accuracy of quantum computing. One of the biggest problems right now is that quantum machines return a lot of junk answers (what the scientists refer to as noise) to almost any question mixed in with the actual solution. You can check out this Nextgov article about the specific differences between quantum and traditional computers if you want to know more about how quantum works. I have little doubt quantum will get faster and more accurate, but what can we do with that power right now?
One thing we might try, which could solve a lot of the problems of quantum right now, is to plug it into, or merge it with, an artificial intelligence. This was suggested by AI entrepreneur Gary Fowler in a recent article in Forbes. Fowler has worked on numerous computer-intelligence projects with many companies over the years, so he knows the strengths and limitations of AI, machine learning and other related technologies.
As Fowler explains it, today’s computer intelligences are limited by the amount of data they have access to, and how quickly they can analyze it. Many of the problems affecting AI today, including things like accidentally programming inherent bias into their systems, could be caused by the limitations of the datasets they are using. Employing quantum computers to give an AI quick access to trillions more data points could supercharge its accuracy and usefulness.
