It is a quarter of a century since the first quantum bits, or qubits, were hooked together to make a rudimentary quantum computer. With their ability to represent both the ones and zeros in traditional computers at the same time, qubits are the most basic components of systems that could far surpass today’s computers [...]
Geoffrey Hinton, professor at the University of Toronto and engineering fellow at Google Brain, recently published a paper on the Forward-Forward algorithm (FF), a technique for training neural networks that uses two forward passes of data through the network, instead of backpropagation, to update the model weights. Hinton's motivation for the algorithm is to address some of the shortcomings of [...]
Abstract Photonic qubits should be controllable on-chip and noise-tolerant when transmitted over optical networks for practical applications. Furthermore, qubit sources should be programmable and have high brightness to be useful for quantum algorithms and grant resilience to losses. However, widespread encoding schemes only combine at most two of these properties. Here, we overcome this [...]
A quantum harmonic oscillator—a structure that can control the location and energy of quantum particles that could, in the future, be used to develop new technologies including OLEDs and miniature lasers—has been made at room temperature by researchers led by the University of St Andrews. The research, conducted in collaboration with scientists at Nanyang [...]
New research led by a team of scientists at The Australian National University (ANU) has outlined a way to achieve more accurate measurements of microscopic objects using quantum computers—a step that could prove useful in a huge range of next-generation technologies, including biomedical sensing. Examining the various individual properties of a large everyday object [...]
Thirteen, 53, and 433. That's the size of quantum computers in terms of quantum bits, or qubits, which has significantly grown in the last years due to important public and private investments and initiatives. It is not only a mere question of quantity: the quality of the prepared qubits is as important as their number for a quantum computer to beat [...]
In what specific cases do quantum computers surpass their classical counterparts? That’s a hard question to answer, in part because today’s quantum computers are finicky things, plagued with errors that can pile up and spoil their calculations. By one measure, of course, they’ve already done it. In 2019, physicists at Google announced that they used a 53-qubit [...]
Generative AI exploded into the mainstream last year. Led by Elon Musk cofounded OpenAI — the creator of both DALL-E 2, a text-to-image generator, and ChatGPT, an impressive text-generating system — the industry has absolutely exploded, as these generative tools and others, notably the image-generating systems Stable Diffusion and Mid journey, have dazzled investment firms and the [...]
Once a mine has been exhausted of its ore, there's really no use for it anymore – it just becomes an abandoned hole in the ground. According to a new study, however, the shafts of such mines could serve in energy-storing gravity batteries. First of all, just what is a gravity battery? Well, in [...]
On December 5th, scientists at the National Ignition Facility reached a breakthrough in nuclear fusion by producing a reaction with an energy gain. It could be a step toward a world in the distant future where fusion is a source of power. 60 Minutes - Newsmakers Inside the nuclear fusion breakthrough that could be [...]
