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Posted on Oct 6, 2018
Exciting new research provides a breakthrough that can eventually be explained by quantum mechanics – a new approach to one of the most enduring mysteries in science the "primordial soup" of organic molecules that once existed on Earth?
For the first time, with a quantum computer, individual living organisms represented at a microscopic level with superconducting qubits were made to "mate," interact with their environment, and "die" to model some of the major factors that influence evolution.
"The goal of the proposed model is to reproduce the characteristic processes of Darwinian evolution, adapted to quantum algorithms and quantum computing," reports Science Alerts. To do this, the IBM QX4 quantum computer developed by IBM is accessible through the cloud. Quantum computers make use of qubits, whose information value can be a combination of both one and zero. This property, known as superposition, means that large-scale quantum computers will have vastly more information-processing power than classical computers.
The researchers, led by Enrique Solano from the University of the Basque Country in Spain, coded units of quantum life made up of two qubits (those basic building blocks of quantum physics): one to represent the genotype and one to represent the phenotype (the outward manifestation of that code or the "body"). These units were programmed to reproduce, mutate, evolve and die, in part using quantum entanglement – just as any real living being would.
The new research, published in Scientific Reports On Thursday, a breakthrough that can eventually be answered by quantum mechanics, a theory of physics that describes the universe of interactions between subatomic particles.
This quantum algorithm simulates major biological processes such as self-replication, mutation, interaction between individuals, and death at the level of qubits. The end result was an accurate simulation of the evolutionary process that plays out at the microscopic level, with life, a complex macroscopic feature emerging from inanimate matter. Individuals were represented in the model using two qubits. One qubit represents the individual's genotype, the genetic code behind a certain trait, and the other its phenotype, or the physical expression of that trait.
To model self-replication, the algorithm copied the expectation value of the genotype to a new qubit through entanglement, a process that links qubits so that information is instantaneously exchanged between them. To account for mutations, the researchers encode random qubit rotations into the algorithm that were applied to the genotype qubits.
The algorithm then modeled the interaction between the individual and its environment, which represented aging and eventually death by taking the new genotype from the self-replicating action in the previous step and transferring it to another qubit via entanglement. The new qubit represents the individual's phenotype. The lifetime of the individual depends on the information coded in this phenotype.
Finally, these individuals interact with one another, but the phenotypes only have to be queried and exchanged if they are certain to be coded in their genotype qubits. The interaction produced a new individual and the process began again. In total, the researchers repeated this process more than 24,000 times.
"Our quantum individuals are driven by an adaptation effort along the lines of a quantum Darwinian evolution, which effectively transfers the quantum information through generations of larger multi-qubit entangled states," the researchers wrote.
While the computing technology needed to achieve so-called "quantum supremacy" is not quite there, the work of Solano and his colleagues could eventually lead to quantum computers that can autonomously model a human-designed algorithm.
"We leave open the question whether the origin of life is genuinely quantum mechanical," explain the researchers.
"What we do here is that microscopic quantum systems can easily encode quantum features and biological behaviors, usually associated with living systems and natural selection."
Dolphins surfing off the coast of South Western Australia with thanks to Greghuglin.com/Solent
The Daily Galaxy via Motherboard and ScienceAlerts
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