4 ms·

General purpose quantum computing closer to reality with Microsoft breakthroughs

34 points by hexrcs 9y ago

ColanR 9y ago
> Craig Mundie, who as Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer first backed Freedman’s push into quantum computing a dozen years ago, noted that if a quantum computer could hypothetically process a training algorithm for the Cortana digital assistant in a day rather than a month, that would mark a profound improvement in AI advances. I didn't think that quantum computing would help with DNN or parallel processing...what gives?
- maxander 9y ago
  My (admittedly fuzzy) understanding is that while running a DNN is a very parallel problem, training it (back-propagation, in particular) is not and is thought to be susceptible to quantum speedup. Google's work in quantum computing is motivated by the same application.
- iamcasen 9y ago
  It entirely depends on the problem being solved. I am not sure what their ideas are with machine learning, but essentially quantum computers help with parallelization with algorithms that can take advantage of superpositions.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  One of the people mentioned in the article, Svore, works at the QuArC group for MS and has worked on quantum machine learning. (QuArC generally works on how to actually design and use quantum computers.) For example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.3489.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.3489.pdf From my (shallow) understanding, you can get improvements by considering the space of possible states of your quantum system to be the space of weights for your model, and then annealing the quantum system (which is equivalent to optimizing the objective function). The quantum annealing is a (significant) improvement over other optimization methods... or something.
  - martinquantum 9y ago
    +1
    - martinquantum 9y ago
      looks like a quantum computer can train models better. Like, find gradients better or just find better gradients.
- martinquantum 9y ago
  I think that for pattern matching (DNN) it's not clear, but for parallel stuff the quantum computer is like the ultimate SIMD machine.
manuelelucchi 9y ago
What about the quantum programming language? Q#? The extension is .qb so i think not... What do you think?
- martinquantum 9y ago
  The sample they showed did not look like any of the standard .NET languages, so I wonder if they are going with a standalone language. AFAIK most quantum programming languages are actually embedded into another language (C, Haskell, ML) so if they actually implemented a standalone language, that would be interesting. Not sure what the file extension means.
  - jongalloway2 9y ago
    It looks like it was related to Liquid. Info here: http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/ http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/ That specific code sample looks like it was based on the Teleport sample: https://github.com/StationQ/Liquid/blob/master/Samples/Teleport.fsx https://github.com/StationQ/Liquid/blob/master/Samples/Telep...
- martinquantum 9y ago
  when you look at the example, there was also a teleport.g.cs file which looks like a standard #C file, but possibly auto-generated(?) What do you think?
- axonic 9y ago
  Uh oh, here comes Quantum Basic.
lostmsu 9y ago
Here, saved you time on reading 3 pages of bloat. > A new programming language that is designed for developers to create apps to debug on quantum simulators today and run on an actual topological quantum computer in the future.

34 points by hexrcs 9y ago

> Craig Mundie, who as Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer first backed Freedman’s push into quantum computing a dozen years ago, noted that if a quantum computer could hypothetically process a training algorithm for the Cortana digital assistant in a day rather than a month, that would mark a profound improvement in AI advances. I didn't think that quantum computing would help with DNN or parallel processing...what gives?

maxander 9y ago
My (admittedly fuzzy) understanding is that while running a DNN is a very parallel problem, training it (back-propagation, in particular) is not and is thought to be susceptible to quantum speedup. Google's work in quantum computing is motivated by the same application.
iamcasen 9y ago
It entirely depends on the problem being solved. I am not sure what their ideas are with machine learning, but essentially quantum computers help with parallelization with algorithms that can take advantage of superpositions.
SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
One of the people mentioned in the article, Svore, works at the QuArC group for MS and has worked on quantum machine learning. (QuArC generally works on how to actually design and use quantum computers.) For example: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.3489.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.3489.pdf From my (shallow) understanding, you can get improvements by considering the space of possible states of your quantum system to be the space of weights for your model, and then annealing the quantum system (which is equivalent to optimizing the objective function). The quantum annealing is a (significant) improvement over other optimization methods... or something.
- martinquantum 9y ago
  +1
  - martinquantum 9y ago
    looks like a quantum computer can train models better. Like, find gradients better or just find better gradients.
martinquantum 9y ago
I think that for pattern matching (DNN) it's not clear, but for parallel stuff the quantum computer is like the ultimate SIMD machine.

manuelelucchi 9y ago

What about the quantum programming language? Q#? The extension is .qb so i think not... What do you think?

martinquantum 9y ago
The sample they showed did not look like any of the standard .NET languages, so I wonder if they are going with a standalone language. AFAIK most quantum programming languages are actually embedded into another language (C, Haskell, ML) so if they actually implemented a standalone language, that would be interesting. Not sure what the file extension means.
- jongalloway2 9y ago
  It looks like it was related to Liquid. Info here: http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/ http://stationq.github.io/Liquid/ That specific code sample looks like it was based on the Teleport sample: https://github.com/StationQ/Liquid/blob/master/Samples/Teleport.fsx https://github.com/StationQ/Liquid/blob/master/Samples/Telep...
martinquantum 9y ago
when you look at the example, there was also a teleport.g.cs file which looks like a standard #C file, but possibly auto-generated(?) What do you think?
axonic 9y ago
Uh oh, here comes Quantum Basic.

lostmsu 9y ago

Here, saved you time on reading 3 pages of bloat. > A new programming language that is designed for developers to create apps to debug on quantum simulators today and run on an actual topological quantum computer in the future.