[ad_1]
Everyone is always talking about time travel, but if you ask me, the ultimate time vacation would be just hanging the clock a bit. Who among us couldn’t use a five or six month break after 2020 before committing to a whole new calendar year? It’s not you 2021; it’s us.
Sadly, this is not a Rick and Morty episode, so we can’t stop time until we’re ready to move on.
But maybe our computers can.
A pair of studies on quantum algorithms, performed by independent research teams, recently graced arXiv preprint servers. They’re both pretty much the same thing: using smart algorithms to solve nonlinear differential equations.
And if you squint through the lens of speculative science you can conclude, like me, that this is a recipe for computers that can basically break time in order to solve a problem requiring an almost immediate solution.
Linear equations are the bread and butter of classical computing. We calculate the numbers and use basic binary calculus to determine what happens next in a linear pattern or sequence using conventional algorithms. But nonlinear differential equations are more difficult. They are often too difficult or totally impractical for even the most powerful conventional computers to solve.
[Read next: How Netflix shapes mainstream culture, explained by data]
The hope is that one day quantum computers will break down the barrier of difficulty and make these hard-to-solve problems look like ordinary computational tasks.
When computers solve these kinds of problems, they are essentially predicting the future. Today’s AI running on conventional computers can look at an image of a ball in the air and, with enough data, predict where the ball is going. You can add a few more balls to the equation, and the computer will still do it correctly most of the time.
But once you get to the point where the interactivity scale creates a feedback loop, like when observing particle interactions or, say, if you toss a handful of glitter in the air, a Conventional computer basically doesn’t have the ooomph dealing with physics on this scale.
This, as quantum researcher Andrew Childs told Quanta Magazine, is why we cannot predict the weather. There are just too many particle interactions for an ordinary old computer to keep up with.
But quantum computers do not obey the binary rules of classical computing. Not only can they zigzag and zigzag, but they can also zigzag as they zag or do neither at the same time. For our purposes, this means that they can potentially solve difficult problems such as “where will each grain of glitter be in 0.02 seconds?” or “what is the optimal route for this traveling salesperson?”
In order to understand how we’re getting from here to there (and what it means), we need to take a look at the aforementioned articles. The first is from the University of Maryland. You can check it out here, but the part we are focusing on now is:
In this paper, we have presented a Carleman quantum linearization (QCL) algorithm for a class of Quadratic nonlinear differential equations. Compared to the previous approach of, our algorithm improves the complexity of an exponential dependence on T to a quadratic dependence, under the condition R <1.
And let’s take a look at the second article. This one comes from a team at MIT:
This paper has shown that quantum computers can in principle achieve an exponential advantage over classical computers in solving nonlinear differential equations. The main potential advantage of the nonlinear quantum equation algorithm over classical algorithms is that it evolves logarithmically in the dimension of solution space, making it a natural candidate for application to high dimensional problems such as the Navier-Stokes equation and other nonlinear fluids, plasmas, etc.
Both articles are fascinating (you should read them later!) But I’ll risk oversimplifying them by saying: they detail how we can build algorithms for quantum computers to solve these really difficult problems.
So what does this mean? We hear about how quantum computers can solve giant drug discovery or math problems, but where does rubber actually go? What I’m saying is classical computing has given us iPhones, jet fighters, and video games. What will it do?
This will potentially give quantum computers the ability to stop time. Now, as you can imagine, that doesn’t mean that neither of us will get a remote with a pause button, which we can use to take a break from an argument like the Adam Sandler movie “Click”. .
This means that a powerful enough quantum computer running the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of the algorithms under development today might one day be able to functionally assess particle-level physics with sufficient speed and precision to make the passage of time a non-factor in its execution.
So theoretically, if someone in the future throws a handful of glitter at you and you have a swarm of quantum-powered defense drones, they could respond instantly by positioning themselves perfectly between you and the particles coming from the glitter explosion. to protect you. Or, for a less interesting use case, you can model and forecast weather models of the Earth with near perfect accuracy over extremely long time periods.
What this ultimately means is that quantum computers might one day operate in a functional time vacuum, solving problems almost at the exact infinitely finite moment they occur.
H / t: Max G Levy, Quanta Magazine
Published January 13, 2021 – 19:46 UTC
[ad_2]
Source link