Quantum Computing 101, With D-Wave's Vern Brownell

D-Wave CEO Vern Brownell describes the promise and challenge of quantum computing.

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This video is a highlight of Brownell's presentation at Exponential Finance 2014, presented by Singularity University and CNBC.

Transcript: Quantum computing is a whole new category of computing and it directly leverages the laws of quantum mechanics to do a computation. As we all know quantum mechanics are the most fundamental laws in the universe. It describes how everything in the universe works. So what we've built and what other quantum computing researchers have done is create computers that directly use those laws of quantum mechanics. And that sounds fairly straightforward but, in fact, it's quite difficult to do because the enemy of quantum computing is the environment. And when I saw the environment I mean things like temperature. And when you have temperature you have molecules moving around that cause interference to the quantum computation. You also have electromagnetic interference from radio sources and gamma rays and all sorts of things.

So you need to create a very quiet, clean, cold environment for these chips to work in. And ultimately what we're building is a quantum computer on a chip that's about the size of your fingernail in this very exotic environment. So that environment runs at near absolute zero. So absolute zero as you know is the lowest temperature possible in the universe. It's also called zero degrees Kelvin.

So these machines run at a very low temperature so that they can have that pristine, very clean, quiet environment to run in and it doesn't disturb that quantum computation. And, in fact, it runs down at what's called 10 millikelvin which is .01 Kelvin. Absolute zero is zero degrees Kelvin so this is running at minus 273.14 degrees C and the lowest possible temperature in physics is minus 273.15 degrees C. So very, very cold. A very, very rarified environment because we're also running in effectively a magnetic vacuum. So you could consider these environments, these rigs that we built, these systems that we built to be probably the most rarified environments in the universe unless there's other intelligent life in the universe that has, you know, pure colder environments. For instance, outer space is 150 times warmer than the environment that we built for these quantum computations. So you may ask why do we go through all this trouble? The answer is the problems of quantum computing is exponential speed ups over classical computing for a particular set of problems.

And that's very important and exciting to researchers that are working on that kind of human scale problem ranging from things like developing drugs for cancer or better modeling the molecular interactions of cancer and how it attacks cells and things like that to big data analysis, looking for patterns and inferences and drawing insight from large amounts of data or doing things like better modeling financial services markets and better managing risk and so on. So there's all kind of applications that aren't particularly well suited by today's type of computers and I refer to today's computers as classical computers. They compute largely in the same way they have for the past 60 or 70 years since John von Neumann and others invented the first electronic computers back in the 40s. And we've had amazing progress over those years. Think of all the developments there have been in the hardware side and the software side over those 60 or 70 years and how much energy has been put -- energy and development has been put into those areas.

And we've achieved marvelous things with that classical computing environment. But it has its limits too and people sometimes ask why would we need any more powerful computers. These applications, these problems that we're trying to solve are incredibly hard problems and aren't well suited for the architecture of classical computing. So I see quantum computing as another set of tools, another resource, set of resources for scientists, researchers, computer scientists, programmers to develop and enhance some of these capabilities to really change the world in a much better way than we're able to today with classical computing. It's not a replacement for classical computing. It will be used in what I would call hybrid approach where you're going to see both the capability that's already been built in high performance computing and other types of computing markets working very closely with quantum computing resources...
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Directed/Produced by Jonathan Fowler, Elizabeth Rodd, and Dillon Fitton