Google bets on quantum computing

Google has upped its bet that quantum computing will bring major advances in artificial intelligence, announcing a seven-year contract on Monday with the only company that claims to have already built a working quantum computer.

Along with NASA, Google has spent the last two years testing a system made by Canadian company D-Wave Systems at the NASA Ames Research centre alongside its Silicon Valley headquarters.

Google and the US space agency have now extended their contract for seven years, D-Wave said, giving them use of a new system that is twice as powerful, along with access to future generations of the technology.

The search company has been trying to apply quantum technology to solving problems like teaching computers to see and understand language, according to Vern Brownell, D-Wave chief executive.

Quantum computers seek to overcome the limitations of today’s computer systems by applying the subatomic physics of quantum mechanics to greatly increase computing capacity. Rather than being on or off, like the bits in a classical computer, the so-called qubits in a quantum computer can be in both states at the same time, massively increasing the number of possibilities that can be analysed simultaneously.

The latest D-Wave system has more than 1,000 qubits; nearly double the number of the system Google and NASA have been testing. Mr Brownell said that tests on the company’s latest system showed that it could outperform even specialised classical computer systems for the particular class of problems for which quantum computers are best suited, which involve optimisation of large volumes of data.

Despite the claimed advances in the lab, the technology is still in the experimental stage, given the difficulty of programming quantum computers and accurately measuring their performance.

“Google has some of the most sophisticated data centres in the world, we’d have to outperform those data centres before we got into production,” said Mr Brownell. Classical computing has more than half a century of systems design and programming behind it, giving it a big edge over an entirely new area of research, he added.

Last year, a scientific paper questioned whether D-Wave’s system even qualified as a true quantum computer, highlighting the difficulty of identifying subatomic phenomena that break the classical laws of physics.

D-Wave claimed that it had overcome those doubts and produced benchmark tests showing the technology could outperform in solving certain classes of problems. “I don’t think anyone really disputes this is a quantum computer anymore,” Mr Brownell said. “Now it’s just a question of how powerful it can get.”