Google, D-Wave Claim to Have Created First Quantum Computing Image Search

Posted 12/15/2009 at 6:50am | by Paul Lilly

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Some would consider quantum computing the holy grail of computer technology, and while there's often talk of quantum breakthroughs, nothing ever seems to materialize. Hoping to change that, Canadian firm D-Wave Systems has developed what it claims to be working 16-qubit, 28-qubit, and 128-qubit quantum computer chips.

A portion of the chips were fabricated at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab's microdevices lab in Pasadena, and though there's no shortage of skepticism among the research community, scientists who saw the work for themselves back D-Wave's credibility.

So does Google, who in a blog post last week said that it had been working with D-Wave to develop quantum computers to power a search of still images in a database of images, video, and PDFs. According to Google, it's been a three-year project that has started to pay off.

"Today, at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference (NIPS 2009), we show the progress we have made," Google wrote. "We demonstrate a detector that has learned to spot cars by looking at example pictures. It was trained with adiabatic quantum optimization using a D-Wave C4 Chimera chip."

Is it the holy grail? Not quite. Google went on to say that there are still many open questions. What's encouraging to Google, however, is that based on the company's experiments, D-Wave's detector platform performed better than those Google had trained using classical solvers running on PCs in the search giant's data centers.

Image Credit: D-Wave