Sounds good news for high performance computation.
When asked what he likes best about working for Google, physicist John Martinis does not mention the famous massage chairs in the hallways, or the free snacks available just about anywhere at the company's campus in Mountain View, California. Instead, he marvels at Google's tolerance of failure in pursuit of a visionary goal. "If every project they try works," he says, "they think they aren't trying hard enough."
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For now, however, Martinis and other veterans of the field caution that quantum computing is still in the early stages. Although industry is now deep into the research, no one even has one of these things to play with. Quantum computing today is comparable to conventional computing in the years after the Second World War, he says, when every device was a laboratory experiment that had been crafted by hand. "We're somewhere between the invention of the transistor and the invention of the integrated circuit," he concludes. At Google, the project has the buzz of a Silicon Valley start-up, says Martinis, albeit one with hefty backing. After years of the hard work of perfecting qubits, he is happy to finally be able to focus on building a quantum computer that can actually solve real problems. "Google created a new name for scientists working on the hardware effort, 'quantum engineers'," says Martinis. "This is a dream job for me."
Feed: Nature - Issue - nature.com science feeds
Posted on: Wednesday, 3 December 2014 11:00 AM
Author: Elizabeth Gibney
Subject: Physics: Quantum computer quest
Physics: Quantum computer quest
Nature 516, 7529 (2014). http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/516024a
Author: Elizabeth Gibney
After a 30-year struggle to harness quantum weirdness for computing, physicists finally have their goal in reach.
View article...<//feeds.nature.com/~r/nature/rss/current/~3/rFDIbExs-uU/516024a>
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