NASA is paying $15 million to acquire a computer that uses “quantum physics” to increase its speed. The said computer is said to be more than 3,000 faster than the existing computers.
The idea of quantum physics was introduced by Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schroedinger, and many others. In our modern time, scientists improved it and proved that an object doesn’t have to be massive in order to produce massive results.
Erik Lucero of the University of California, Santa Barbara and his research team applied the concept to develop a 6mm-by-6mm chip that can process calculations up to 10 qubits which then became the blueprint of the quantum computer. 1 qubit is equal to 10,000 kbps.
NASA is purchasing a quantum computer that has a D-Wave Two processor running on a 512 qubit speed from D-Wave Systems Inc. based in Canada. The U.S agency believes that it can help them solve mathematical problems in just a second and provide more possible solutions which can help them arrive to the best decision or conclusion immediately.
Google is teaming with NASA to use the quantum computer and see if they can use it to push voice recognition and artificial intelligence on computers.
D-Wave Systems has been criticized by several scientists but was able to pass the test conducted by NASA and Google wherein it revealed that the quantum computer was indeed 3,600 faster than existing computers.
Still, some physicists question the ability of the quantum computer to have a stable quantum state. "You get drop out… decoherence, where the qubits lapse into being simple 1s and 0s instead of the entangled quantum states you need. Errors creep in," says Prof Alan Woodward of Surrey University.
D-Wave Systems is now doing further studies about quantum annealing - a way of refining the best mathematical solutions from all the possible solutions to establish efficiency in case the computer becomes unstable.
NASA aims to start using the quantum computer within the last quarter of 2013.
