TED Talks Daily - Quantum computers aren’t what you think — they’re cooler | Hartmut Neven
Episode Date: July 17, 2024Quantum computers obtain superpowers by tapping into parallel universes, says Hartmut Neven, the founder and lead of Google Quantum AI. He explains how this emerging tech can far surpass trad...itional computers by relying on quantum physics rather than binary logic, and shares a roadmap to build the ultimate quantum computer. Learn how this fascinating and powerful tech can help humanity take on seemingly unsolvable problems in medicine, sustainable energy, AI, neuroscience and more.
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TED Audio Collective but to really understand its promise. The founder and lead at Google Quantum AI, Hartmut Nevin,
took the TED stage to break down how it works in practice.
After the break, better understand this revolution in computing by hearing it in action.
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And now, our TED Talk of the day.
I'm Hartmut.
I lead Google Quantum AI.
I've been working on quantum computing since 2012.
And let me tell you why it is so intriguing.
Today's computers, like your laptop or a server at a Google data center, operate on the binary
logic of zeros and ones. A quantum computer replaces the binary logic with the laws of
quantum physics. That gives it more powerful operations, allowing it to perform certain
computations with way fewer steps.
So where does this superpower come from?
Quantum computing is the first technology that takes the idea seriously that we live
in a multiverse.
It can be seen as farming out computations to parallel universes. Let me explain.
In quantum physics,
the key mathematical object to describe many worlds
is called superposition.
You just need three bits to describe it.
Each coin is a two-state system,
heads or tails, zero or one.
We look at a start state.
If I were to know which forces act on the system,
then I can predict its trajectory and future states.
This is how we reason in classical physics and also in everyday life.
But if we were to treat this as a quantum system,
then it can branch into many configurations simultaneously,
and we have to keep track of all those trajectories, any object, myself or the world at large,
exists in a superposition of many configurations.
Intriguingly, look around in this room.
We are forming a configuration too.
And the equations of quantum physics would suggest that we sit in different arrangements in different worlds.
This superpower can be applied to computation.
Picture a search task.
By envisioning a very tall closet with a million drawers,
I place an item in one of the drawers.
How many drawers do you have to open to find the item?
In average, it will be half a million.
But if you had access to a quantum algorithm,
it would only be a thousand steps to find the item.
How in the world can this be?
Indeed, it cannot be in a single world.
So here you see a good example
how quantum computing can attain an advantage
by performing computations in parallel worlds.
So what can you do with quantum computers today?
We have prepared interesting quantum states
and studied their properties.
This has led to dozens of publications in high-impact journals
like Nature or Science.
Actually, I like to think of it as creating little pieces of magic.
For example, one state we prepared
can be thought of as spawning a tiny traversable wormhole.
We can use it to learn about the physics of wormholes.
We can throw a qubit in
and see how it reappears on the other side. We made time crystals. That's a cool word, isn't it?
Like, who doesn't want to have a time crystal as an earring? Time crystals have amazing
physical properties. They change periodically in time without ever exchanging energy with the environment.
They are the closest to a perpetual mobile that the laws of physics allow you to get.
Or a final example.
Non-abelian anions.
This is a mouthful, but these are systems that change their overall properties
when exchanging two identical parts,
something humans have never seen before.
Because envision a little house made of Lego bricks
and envision swapping two bricks that look identical.
In everyday life, you would not notice a difference,
but quantum physicists had predicted that systems can exist,
that exchange or change their properties when you exchange two identical parts.
To date, nobody has performed a practical application
that can only be done on a quantum computer,
despite what you may have read in the press.
But today I'm excited to tell you that we
are completing the design of an algorithm that may lead to first commercial applications. This
quantum algorithm performs signal processing to enable new ways to detect and analyze molecules
using nuclear electronic spin spectroscopy.
In time, this may lead to exciting consumer applications.
Envision a device akin to an electronic nose in your phone or a smartwatch.
Wouldn't it be awesome if your phone could warn you that you stepped into a room with dangerous viruses?
Or if your smartwatch could detect free radicals in your bloodstream
and tell you it's time to drink your acai juice
or warn you of allergens in food
or many other truly helpful use cases.
And now, back to the episode.
To unlock more applications, we will need to build a large error-corrected quantum computer.
How to build a computer with a million physical qubits.
It consists of six milestones, and we achieved already the first two. Prior to 2019, nobody had shown a beyond
classical computation on a quantum computer. We were the first to demonstrate it. Our chip
could perform a computation that the then fastest supercomputer would have needed 10,000 years to do. But recently we repeated this experiment, and now Frontier, today's
top supercomputer, would need one billion years to perform this computation. This dramatic
growth in compute power corroborates Neven's law, which says that the power of quantum computers will grow at a double exponential rate.
In 2023, we achieved a second milestone.
We demonstrated again for the first time that quantum error correction is a scalable technology.
Error correction sounds boring, but it's crucial.
Today, our two-qubit operations have an error rate of one in a thousand.
That means that in every thousand steps or so, the quantum computer will crash.
To improve this, we combine many physical qubits to a logical qubit
to reduce the error rate to one in a billion or even less.
We are about halfway through our roadmap and we are optimistic
that we will complete it before the end of this decade.
We have done analytical and numerical studies to predict which algorithms will be impactful
on such a large quantum computer. A class of applications we like and we call Feynman's Killer App is the simulation of systems where quantum effects are important.
This is relevant for designing more effective, more targeted medicines.
Specifically, we have worked with a pharmaceutical company on algorithms to describe cytochrome P450.
This group of enzymes metabolizes about 75 percent of the drugs we take.
Or the design of lighter, faster-charging batteries
that can hold a larger charge for electric cars or even electric airplanes.
Or to hasten the design of fusion reactors
to help with climate change,
arguably humanity's most urgent challenge.
A recent result is a novel algorithm
that delivers significant speed-up for optimization.
This is a big deal,
because optimization problems are ubiquitous
in engineering, finance, or machine learning.
A way to think about this result is in the future,
when an AI will play chess or go against a quantum AI,
the quantum AI will win.
This result shows that quantum computers will become a must-have capability
to serve foundational computational tasks.
I'm also very interested in the intersection of physics and neurobiology.
Quantum information science may enable us to answer one of humanity's deepest questions.
What creates conscious experience?
An attractive conjecture is that consciousness is how we experience the emergence of a single classical world out of the many the multiverse is composed of.
With academic collaborators, I have started a program to experimentally test this conjecture
using methods of quantum neurobiology.
If our conjecture is correct, this would allow us to expand human consciousness
in space, time and complexity.
In conclusion, we are making steady progress
towards building the world's first useful quantum computer
and applying its enormous power to important challenges.
A quantum computer will be a gift to future generations,
giving them a new tool
to solve problems that today aren't solvable. Thank you.
Support for this show comes from Airbnb. If you know me, you know I love staying in Airbnbs when
I travel. They make my family feel most at home when we're away from home. As we settled down at our Airbnb during a recent vacation to Palm Springs, I pictured my
own home sitting empty. Wouldn't it be smart and better put to use welcoming a family like mine by
hosting it on Airbnb? It feels like the practical thing to do, and with the extra income, I could
save up for renovations to make the space even more inviting for ourselves and for future guests.
Your home might be worth more than you think.
Find out how much at airbnb.ca slash host.
That was Hartmut Nevin at TED 2024.
If you're curious about TED's curation,
find out more at TED.com slash curation guidelines.
And that's it for today. TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was
produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Autumn Thompson,
and Alejandra Salazar. It was mixed by Christopher Faisy-Bogan. Additional support from Emma Taubner,
Daniela Balarezo, and Will Hennessy. I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed. Thanks for listening.
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