Page 134 - Elana Freeland - Under an Ionized Sky

The first quantum computer comes from D-Wave Systems in Burnaby, British Columbia,
Canada, and its first customer was aerospace giant Lockheed Martin in 2011 for its University of
Southern California Quantum Computation Center. The Quantum Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory (QuAIL) run by the Google-NASA-Moffatt Field Universities Space Research
Center consortium has a D-Wave Two, and D-Wave’s 2048 adiabatic quantum computer is at
NASA Ames and Google X, which is connected to CERN through the UC Berkeley hub for the
ESnet5 fiber optic network with a speed of nearly 100 gigabits per second on a 300 GHz band
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for “research in high energy physics, climate science and genomics. ESnet5 is all about
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terabytes and terahertz transmitters. The NSA’s new $2 billion Utah Data Center now operates
a 512-qubit chip code-named “Vesuvius” and bankrolled by Goldman Sachs. Vesuvius can
execute more than 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 computations at
once, which would take millions of years on a standard desktop.
D-Wave’s site (dwavesys.com) boasts of the amazing data crunching and searches its “exotic
tool” can achieve: genomic analysis, “looking for bad guys in large amounts of data,” space
exploration, building AIs, simultaneous comparisons of multiple solutions in the wake of, say, a
“natural” disaster—and a 512-qubit quantum computer’s “central hubs” that can unlock any
encrypted file.

A longtime goal among cryptologists has been to perfect the “quantum Internet”—which in the most basic way
possible, uses the main principle of quantum mechanics to transfer communications from one point to another. . .like a
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hub-and-spoke network in which all messages anywhere in the network get routed from a main node—a central hub.

Who needs a PROMIS backdoor when there is D-Wave?
But it is the Mephistophelean nature of D-Wave’s qubit chip that truly sets it apart from a
mere supercomputer. Eric Ladizinsky, co-founder and chief scientist of D-Wave who built the
512-qubit quantum computer, equates it with the Manhattan Project and magic:

Quantum computers are not made of simple transistors and logic gates like the CPU on your PC. They don’t even
function in ways that seem rational to a typical computing engineer. Almost magically, quantum computers take
logarithmic problems and transform them into “flat” computations whose answers seem to appear from an alternate
dimension.

For example, a mathematical problem that might have 2 to the power of n possible solutions — where n is a large
number like 1024 — might take a traditional computer longer than the age of the universe to solve. A quantum
computer, on the other hand, might solve the same problem in mere minutes because it quite literally operates across
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multiple dimensions simultaneously.

The environment of the very small, niobium D-Wave chip cloistered in its ten-foot black
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cabinet must be kept colder than deep space at –273.13°C (just above absolute zero ). It is the
cold that makes the chip behave as a superconductor. Also, to function optimally the D-Wave
processor requires an extremely low magnetic environment—50,000X lower than the Earth’s
ambient magnetic field.
[Note: Interestingly enough, Lucifer (Large Binocular Telescope Near-infrared Utility with
Carnera and Integral Field Unit for Extragalactic Research) in Arizona is chilled to -213°C
(-351°F) for near-infrared observations.]
Unlike the supercomputer, the D-Wave quantum computer is indeed artificial intelligence. Its
binary classification is its ability to categorize and label vast amounts of complex input data
(text, images, videos, phone calls, etc.); its quantum unsupervised feature learning (QUFL) is its