Quantum computing is famously hard to grasp even IBM’s “Beginner’s Guide” is laughingly vague. In discussing Microsoft’s latest initiatives, Bill Gates called the physics “hieroglyphics,” and when asked if he could explain it in one sentence, Satya Nadella said “I don’t think so. I wish I could.”
So, let’s just talk regarding what it can do, then. By taking account of the principles of superposition and entanglement, quantum computers can solve specific types of problems exponentially faster than the best supercomputers. “It would enable scientists to do calculations in minutes or hours that would take the existence of the universe on even the most excellent classical computers,” Microsoft reveals. “That, in turn, would mean that men could find solutions to scientific questions beforehand thought unanswerable.”
Microsoft is finally building a language for computers that don’t really exist yet. The most difficult experimental machine, a 16/17 qubit model, was developed by IBM and has run over 300,000 experiments. It’s far from standing ready for business applications, though. IBM recently revealed an initiative to build practical quantum computers called IBM Q and has already published its own programming tools via an API called the IBM Quantum Experience.
Microsoft’s programming language doesn’t hold a name yet, but the company already has plans for quantum computing in AI. In critical, it thinks that the mechanisms could be used to train its Cortana digital assistant in days rather of months. “Even if everything else was the same, Cortana would develop 30 times faster,” Microsoft’s research chief Craig Mundie says.
To get quantum computing going more quickly, Microsoft’s star technical researcher, Michael Freedman below, is trying to build both the hardware and software for a “topological quantum computer” I’m not even working to try to explain that. To that aim, he has hired “some of the world’s preeminent condensed-matter and theoretical physicists, materials, scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists,” Microsoft says.
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