Companies, countries battle to develop quantum computers | 60 Minutes

Artificial intelligence is the magic of the moment, but this is a story about what comes next. Something incomprehensible Tomorrow IBM will announce and advance a completely new type of computing, one that can solve in

minutes

problems that would take today's super

computers

millions of years; That's the difference in Quantum computing, a technology being

develop

ed at IBM, Google and others, named after

quantum

physics that describes the forces of the subatomic realm. The science is deep and we can't scratch the surface, but we hope to explain enough so you won't be taken by surprise. for a breakthrough that could transform civilization history will continue in a moment the

quantum

computer pushes the limits of knowledge new science new engineering everything leads to this processor that computes with the atomic forces that created the universe I think this moment seems to us like the pioneers who in the 1940s and 1950s built the first digital

computers

Dario Gill is something of a Spanish quantum crusader born with a PhD in electrical engineering Gil is head of research at IBM How much faster is this than, say, the best supercomputer in the world? world today?

We are now at a stage where we can do certain calculations with these systems that would require the largest supercomputers in the world to be able to do similar calculations, but the good thing about this is that we see that we are going to continue to expand that. capacity such that not even a million or a billion of those supercomputers connected together could do the calculations of these future machines, so we have come a long way and the most exciting part is that we have a roadmap and a journey in this moment where it will continue to increase at a rate that will be shocking.

I'm not sure the world is ready for this change. I definitely won't understand the change. Let's go back to 1947 and the invention of a switch called a transistor. The transistor is a new The well-known computers have processed information on transistors since then, they have become faster as more transistors were put on a chip, today there are billions of them, but that many are needed because each transistor It contains information in only two states: it is on or off like a coin, heads or tails. It abandons the transistors and encodes information into electrons that behave like this coin we created with animation.

Electrons behave in such a way that they are heads and tails and everything in between. You have gone from handling one bit of information at a time in a transistor to exponential. With more data you can see that there is a fantastic amount of information stored when you can look at all possible angles, not just up or down. Physicist Miio Kaku of the City University of New York already calls today's computers classic. He uses a maze to explain the quantum difference. look at a classical computer calculating how a mouse navigates a maze, it's painful, pain, one by one you have to map each left turn, right turn, left turn, right turn before you find the goal, now a quantum computer scans all possible paths simultaneously this is amazing how many spins there are hundreds of possible spins right quantum computers do it all at once kaku's book titled Quantum Supremacy explains what is at stake we are watching a race a race between China between IBM Google Microsoft Honeywell all the big guys that are in this race to create a functional and operationally efficient quantum computer because the nation or company that does it will rule the world economy, but a reliable general purpose quantum computer is a task difficult, but maybe that's why this wall is in the lobby of Google's quantum lab in California here. we got an inside look starting with a microscope view of what replaces the transistor this here is a elbow and this is another elbow this is a chain of 5 elbows those crosses at the bottom are short elbows for quantum bits hold the electrons and They act like artificial atoms, unlike transistors, each additional elbow doubles the power of the computer, it is exponential, so while 20 transistors are 20 times more powerful than one, 20 elbows are a million times more powerful than one , so this is placed here on the refrigerator and Karina Chow, COO. from Google lab showed us the processor that contains the qits, much of the above cools the qits to what physicists call near absolute zero, near absolute zero as I understand it is about 460 degrees below 0° F, so it's as cold as anything can get, yes, almost as cold.

As possible, the temperature inside a sealed computer is one of the coldest places in the universe, Deep Freeze eliminates electrical resistance and isolates the elbows from external vibrations so they can be controlled with an electromagnetic field. The elbows should vibrate in unison, but that's a difficult trick. It's called coherence once you have achieved elbow coherence, how easy it is to maintain it, it's really difficult. Consistency is very challenging. Coherence is fleeting in all similar machines. Coherence is constantly broken creating errors. We're making about one error out of every hundred or So ultimately we think we're going to need about one error out of every million steps that would probably be identified as one of the biggest barriers: mitigating those errors and extending consistency time while scales to larger machines are the challenges facing German Americans.

Scientist Hartm Mot Nevan, who founded Google's lab and founded it in 2012, can the problems standing in the way of quantum computing be solved? I must confess that my subtitle here is Boss Optimist, so having said this, I would say that at this point no. We don't need any more fundamental advances, we need small improvements here and there, we have all the pieces together, we just need to integrate them well to build systems. getting bigger and bigger and do you think all this will be integrated into one system and in what period of time? Yeah, we often say we want to do it by the end of the decade so we can use this Kennedy quote and do it by the end of the decade, the end of this decade, yeah, five or six years, yeah, that's the line. time.

Dario. Gil predicts and IBM's research director told us something surprising: there are problems that classical computers can never solve and I think this is an important point because we are used to saying that computers get better, in reality there are many, many problems that are So it is complex that we can make that statement that in reality classical computers will never be able to solve that problem. Not now, not in 100 years, not in a thousand years. In reality, you need a different way of representing information and processing it. That's what Quantum offers you. There is no Quantum that can give us answers to impossible problems in physics, chemistry, engineering and medicine, which is why IBM and the Cleveland Clinic have installed one of the first quantum computers.

To get out of the lab and into the real world, it takes too long to find it. the solutions we need now we sat down with Dario Gil and Dr. Sill SRO, director of research at the Cleveland Clinic. She told us that healthcare would be transformed if quantum computers could model the behavior of proteins. The molecules that regulate all the proteins of life change shape to change. They work in ways that are too complex to follow and when they get it wrong, that causes disease, they take many forms, many forms depending on what they are doing, where they are and what other protein it is with.

I need to understand the shape it is in when it is working. an interaction or a function that I don't want it to do for that patient with cancer, autoimmunity, is a problem, we are completely limited by the computational ability to observe the real-time structure of any molecule. Cleveland Clinic is very proud of their quantum computer, they installed it in a lobby behind the glass that that shiny silver cylinder encloses the kind of cooling system and process processor that you saw earlier. Quantum is not solving the protein problem, but this is more of a test to introduce researchers to the potential of quantum.

People who use this machine have to learn a completely different way of communicating with a computer. I think that's the really cool thing, that you actually just use a regular laptop and write a program, much like you would write a traditional program, but when you know, click, you know, go and run, it just runs on a very different type of computer. There are half a dozen competing designs in the race. China named Quantum a top national priority and the US government is spending nearly $1 billion a year on The first change will come next year, when the United States releases new encryption standards because it is expected to Quantum will one day break the codes that lock everything from national secrets to credit cards.

Tomorrow IBM will present its Quantum 2 system with three times as many elbows as the machine. You saw it in Cleveland last August, we saw system 2 under construction, it's a machine that's like nothing we've ever built and this is it, this is what Dario Gill from IBM told us that system 2 has room to expand at thousands of cubits, what are the chances? That this is one of those things that will be ready in 5 years and always will be, we don't see any obstacles right now that will prevent us from building systems that will have tens of thousands and even 100 thousand elbows working together. so we're pretty sure we'll get there from all the amazing things we heard.

It was the physicist Meio Kaku who guided us down the path to the biggest idea of ​​all. He said we were walking through a quantum computer processing information with subatomic particles. the universe works, you know, when I look at the night sky I see stars I look at the flowers the trees I realize that everything is quantum the splendor of the universe itself the language of the universe is the language of quantum learning that language can bring Reverse engineering at speed more than inconceivable Nature's computer could be a window to creation itself