New Scientist reports that Google has spent the past three years developing a quantum algorithm that can automatically recognize and sort objects from still images or video.

The promise of quantum computing rests with the bizarre physics that occurs at the subatomic level. Different research teams have worked on creating quantum processors that store information as qubits (quantum bits), which can represent both the 1 and 0 of binary computer language at the same time. That dual possibility state allows for much more efficient processing and information storage.

To take an example cited by Google, a classical computer might need 500,000 peeks on average to find a ball hidden somewhere within a million drawers. But a quantum computer could find the ball by just looking into 1,000 drawers — a nice little stunt known as Grover's algorithm.

Google has been using a quantum computing device created by D-Wave, a Canadian firm. But a lack of information about how D-Wave's chip works has led to outside skepticism regarding whether it does indeed count as a quantum computer.

"Unfortunately, it is not easy to demonstrate that a multi-qubit system such as the D-Wave chip indeed exhibits the desired quantum behavior and experimental physicists from various institutions are still in the process of characterizing the chip," wrote Hartmut Neven, head of Google's image recognition team, on the Google research blog.

Whatever D-Wave built has apparently worked for Google. Neven described a new algorithm based on the work of MIT that can sort images of cars from among 20,000 photos faster than anything running in a Google data center today — although the team first trained the algorithm by hand-labeling cars in a test photo batch.

Google's image recognition team has previously made its algorithms work for better online image searches and automatic photo organization. Perhaps we shouldn't be too surprised that the Google folk have also delved into quantum computing, or at least something much faster than existing classical computing.

[via New Scientist]

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Gizmodo buddy Kate Greene interviewed QD Vision's Seth Coe Sullivan and the founder of the MIT spinoff explained the process as such:

The quantum dot lighting solution is relatively simple: Adding red quantum dots to a white LED makes the resulting white light appear warmer. Light from the LED gives electrons in the quantum dots an energetic boost for a short time; when the electrons return to their lower energy state, they emit a photon, a process called photoluminescence. (Photoluminescence is in contrast to electroluminescence, in which electric current, not light, excites electrons.)

Unlike filters, the method does not soak up light and hurt efficiency — they're taking "blue photons from the LED and outputting red photons from the quantum dots." QD Vision's tech got some press earlier in the year, but I hadn't noticed it before writing my ode to the classic lightbulb. And although the bulbs aren't out yet, they'll be $100 when they are. We'll have to take one for a spin when they come around. And if they work, and last as long as they say they should, I'm going to kiss the incandescent goodbye forever. [Kate Greene]

In other words, this is the first time anyone has developed a processor that can handle any set of instructions for more than one quantum bit or "qubit." Rapid progress when you consider that the first single-task quantum processor arrived on the scene less than a year ago.

The NIST team performed 160 different processing routines on the two qubits. Although there are an infinite number of possible two-qubit programs, this set of 160 is large and diverse enough to fairly represent them, Hanneke says, making the processor "universal." The researchers used a random number generator to select the particular routines that would be executed, so all possible programs had an equal chance of selection. The random programs avoided the possibility of bias in testing the processor in the event that some programs ran better or produced more accurate outputs than others. Each program operated accurately an average of 79 percent of the time across 900 runs, each run lasting about 37 milliseconds. To evaluate the processor and the quality of its operation, NIST scientists compared the measured outputs of the programs to idealized, theoretical results.

The programs did not perform easily described mathematical calculations. Rather, they involved various single-qubit "rotations" and two-qubit entanglements. As an example of a rotation, if a qubit is envisioned as a dot on a sphere at the north pole for 0, at the south pole for 1, or on the equator for a balanced superposition of 0 and 1, the dot might be rotated to a different point on the sphere, perhaps from the northern to the southern hemisphere, making it more of a 1 than a 0.

Huh? Yeah, it's a bit confusing, but you can get the basic idea by checking out our Giz Explains on the subject. Just know that programing with multiple qubits is a major turning point in creating the truly "super" computers of tomorrow. [NIST and Ars Technica]

Julian left his quantum physics research path, but he certainly carried knowledge and inspiration from it over into his art career. These sculptures are intended to portray some incredible quantum physics ideas for which there are "no consistent mental images." That craziness aside, the sculptures are lovely eye-candy based on artistic merit alone. [Julian Voss-Andreae via Boing Boing]

Quantum computing is a pretty complicated subject—uh, hello, quantum mechanics plus computers. I'm gonna keep it kinda basic, but recent breakthroughs like this one prove that you should definitely start paying attention to it. Some day, in the future, quantum computing will be cracking codes, powering web searches, and maybe, just maybe, lighting up our Star Trek-style holodecks.

Before we get to the quantum part, let's start with just "computing." It's about bits. They're the basic building block of computing information. They've got two states—0 or 1, on or off, true or false, you get the idea. But two defined states is key. When you add a bunch of bits together, usually 8 of 'em, you get a byte. As in kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and so on. Your digital photos, music, documents, they're all just long strings of 1s and 0s, segmented into 8-digit strands. Because of that binary setup, a classical computer operates by a certain kind of logic that makes it good at some kinds of computing—the general stuff you do everyday—but not so great at others, like finding ginormous prime factors (those things from math class), which are a big part of cracking codes.

Quantum computing operates by a different kind of logic—it actually uses the rules of quantum mechanics to compute. Quantum bits, called qubits, are different from regular bits, because they don't just have two states. They can have multiple states, superpositions—they can be 0 or 1 or 0-1 or 0+1 or 0 and 1, all at the same time. It's a lot deeper than a regular old bit. A qubit's ability to exist in multiple states—the combo of all those being a superposition—opens up a big freakin' door of possibility for computational powah, because it can factor numbers at much more insanely fast speeds than standard computers.

Entanglement—a quantum state that's all about tight correlations between systems—is the key to that. It's a pretty hard thing to describe, so I asked for some help from Boris Blinov, a professor at the University of Washington's Trapped Ion Quantum Computing Group. He turned to a take on Schrödinger's cat to explain it: Basically, if you have a cat in a closed box, and poisonous gas is released. The cat is either dead, 0, or alive, 1. Until I open the box to find out, it exists in both states—a superposition. That superposition is destroyed when I measure it. But suppose I have two cats in two boxes that are correlated, and you go through the same thing. If I open one box and the cat's alive, it means the other cat is too, even if I never open the box. It's a quantum phenomenon that's a stronger correlation than you can get in classical physics, and because of that you can do something like this with quantum algorithms—change one part of the system, and the rest of it will respond accordingly, without changing the rest of the operation. That's part of the reason it's faster at certain kinds of calculations.

The other, explains Blinov, is that you can achieve true parallelism in computing—actually process a lot of information in parallel, "not like Windows" or even other types of classic computers that profess parallelism.

So what's that good for? For example, a password that might take years to crack via brute force using today's computers could take mere seconds with a quantum computer, so there's plenty of crazy stuff that Uncle Sam might want to put it to use for in cryptography. And it might be useful to search engineers at Google, Microsoft and other companies, since you can search and index databases much, much faster. And let's not forget scientific applications—no surprise, classic computers really suck at modeling quantum mechanics. The National Institute of Science and Technology's Jonathan Home suggests that given the way cloud computing is going, if you need an insane calculation performed, you might rent time and farm it out to a quantum mainframe in Google's backyard.

The reason we're not all blasting on quantum computers now is that this quantum mojo is, at the moment, extremely fragile. And it always will be, since quantum states aren't exactly robust. We're talking about working with ions here—rather than electrons—and if you think heat is a problem with processors today, you've got no idea. In the breakthrough by Home's team at NIST—completing a full set of quantum "transport" operations, moving information from one area of the "computer" to another—they worked with a single pair of atoms, using lasers to manipulate the states of beryllium ions, storing the data and performing an operation, before transferring that information to a different location in the processor. What allowed it to work, without busting up the party and losing all the data through heat, were magnesium ions cooling the beryllium ions as they were being manipulated. And those lasers can only do so much. If you want to manipulate more ions, you have to add more lasers.

Hell, quantum computing is so fragile and unwieldy that when we talked to Home, he said much of the effort goes into methods of correcting errors. In five years, he says, we'll likely be working with a mere tens of qubits. The stage it's at right now, says Blinov, is "the equivalent of building a reliable transistor" back in the day. But that's not to say those of tens of qubits won't be useful. While they won't be cracking stuff for the NSA—you'll need about 10,000 qubits for cracking high-level cryptography—that's still enough quantum computing power to calculate properties for new materials that are hard to model with a classic computer. In other words, materials scientists could be developing the case for the iPhone 10G or the building blocks for your next run-of-the-mill Intel processor using quantum computers in the next decade. Just don't expect a quantum computer on your desk in the next 10 years.

Special thanks to National Institute of Standards and Technology's Jonathan Home and the University of Washington Professor Boris Blinov!

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about quantum computing, quantum leaps or undead cats to tips@gizmodo.com, with "Giz Explains" in the subject line.

But because of the fact that the laws of quantum mechanics are so strange, the qubits (atoms) can be placed into a "superposition of multiple states" in order for them to store more than just the standard amount of information.

Now they're working on adding more qubits, which adds more power on an exponential scale. We're going to be Giz Explaining what's up with quantum computing soon. [TGDaily]

A team at the University of Maryland was able to successfully teleport a quantum state (like spin or polarization) from one atom to another over the distance of one meter. How they did it is incredibly complicated: the explanation sounds like half advanced physics and half existential philosophy (i.e. "each photon is in an unknowable superposition of states"). But the end result is that the information doesn't travel the distance between the two atoms. It merely appears at the second and disappears from the first.

The tech is still very young, so there isn't much speculation on, say, when I can stop taking that awful 14-hour bus from Philly to Montreal in favor of teleporting. But it is suggested that this kind of instant transfer of information could be useful in mass exchanges of data, like the Internet. [Live Science]

When intruders do try to hack a quantum exchange, photons in the network become scrambled and the rise in the error rate causes that line to get shut down. The exchange is then automatically rerouted through a different node so that the sender and receiver remain in continuous secure contact. Scientists are currently trying to market it to banks and other holders of sensitive information.

Is it really unbreakable though? Hard to say. Currently there aren't any methods to fully eavesdrop on information while avoid detection, but researchers at MIT were able to nab about 40% by reading the momentum of photons. I can bet that hackers will be all over this, now that the scientists have more or less issued a direct challenge for them to try. [BBC]

These lawsuits raise the obvious question: Does Apple feed off other's ideas, or are other companies just out to hurt Apple where they prosper, the wallet? It isn't too hard to imagine either case. –Travis Hudson

Apple sued over Click Wheel touch sensor technology [iLounge]

They are producing both an external hard drive and a laptop line. They work in Linux and Windows XP and haven't been tested with anything Macintosh/Apple. Sizes of up to 4TB come in something the size of a book of matches (the laptops weigh 4.18 pounds). Stunning. Expensive. Laptops are expected to sell for $17,500. I'm still VERY skeptical, only because this seems impossibly cool.

We're headed back there today for a second look. We seen these sorts of "claims" before and it smacks of Phantom-itis: Broad, exciting claims made in a certain, shall we say, "hysterical" tone by a lone genius.

Also, while we're walking over there, check out these links:

AtomChip Notebook Computer [MuseumofHoaxes]
US 'world genius' touts 6.8GHz 'quantum-optical' CPU [TheRegister]

Product Information Page [AtomChip]