Google has revealed that its upcoming wearable computer, Glass, will in part be powered by quantum computing 鈥� although what that actually means remains unclear.
Earlier this year Google announced that it had purchased a quantum device from D-Wave of Burnaby, Canada, and partnered with NASA to set up the . In a video that debuted today at the at Google New York, the team discuss the types of applications they will explore with the D-Wave computer.
Quantum computers process information in quantum bits, or qubits, which can be both 0 and 1 at the same time. In theory, this should one day allow quantum chips to vastly outperform regular PCs. D-Wave鈥檚 computers remain controversial, because they use a non-mainstream technique called adiabatic computing that does not conclusively exploit quantum phenomena to increase performance.
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But a paper released earlier this year demonstrated that D-Wave could beat PCs running general-purpose optimisation software, which is used in applications from image recognition to machine learning. The new Google video says that the team wants to use D-Wave鈥檚 abilities for tasks such as analysing climate or genomics data and determining whether we are alone in the universe.
鈥淭he overwhelming obvious killer app for quantum computation is optimisation,鈥� says D-Wave founder Geordie Rose in the Google video.
Better blinking
The first real-world application to come out of the lab may be improved algorithms for Google Glass. The headset itself is not able to run quantum software, but it is possible that a quantum computer could optimise an ordinary algorithm for use on the low-powered wearable device.
Although the project is not specifically mentioned in the video, tech site reports that Google engineers have already used D-Wave to design a better blink-detection algorithm, which will allow Glass users to 鈥渃lick鈥� on links by blinking. That fits with an , which also said that Google had used D-Wave to train their blink detectors.
So far, though, D-Wave has not published any results showing that its machines can carry out optimisation problems better than traditional devices that are specifically programmed to solve a given problem. Without this evidence, Google鈥檚 new video has left quantum computing experts unconvinced.
鈥淲hile I don鈥檛 know the details of this Google Glass demo, I鈥檓 sceptical that there鈥檚 anything here that couldn鈥檛 be done much faster and more easily using classical computers,鈥� says of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Best questions
of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich has previously studied the performance of D-Wave鈥檚 computers, and is also unsure of the milestone. 鈥淭his was probably a technology demonstration, showing that such a kind of problem can, in principle, be solved on a D-Wave machine. However, any problem that the machine might have solved could easily have been done on a PC.鈥�
Even if D-Wave鈥檚 computers do not outperform regular machines, they are still worthy of study, says Troyer. 鈥淛ust building a device that can do what the D-Wave machine does is quite an engineering achievement.鈥�
Google and D-Wave did not respond to requests for comment before this article was published. But the collaboration emphasises in its video that they are still in the early days of exploring the technology. 鈥淲e don鈥檛 know what the best questions are to ask that computer 鈥� that鈥檚 exactly what we鈥檙e trying to understand now,鈥� says Eleanor Rieffel of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.
