The Week in Quantum Computing - June 13th - Quantum Computing is nothing by glorified linear algebra. ORCA has a big week,
Issue #91
The Week in Quantum Computing. Brought to you by Sergio Gago (@piratecto). This week Sponsored by Artificial Brain and QCentroid.
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Quick Recap
Three very interesting papers have been published this week. One by Wootton and team to define better quantum games. One for advanced deep Q-Learning on variational algorithms, and definitions of advantage for cryptography. A great piece on quantum inspired for finance with quotes from those doing it in the banks: “Mr. Muthukrishnan said that he hasn’t yet found a quantum-inspired solution that functions so much better than a traditional equation that he has to rush to implement it.”. And one unmissable piece by Scott Aaronson on the paper of computer scientists / information theory scientist at the Solvay conference, together with trolls. ORCA has a big week both delivering a computer and raising $15M, so does Qubit Pharmaceuticals raising €16M.
Enough papers? One more: Provably efficient variational generative modeling of quantum many-body systems via quantum-probabilistic information geometry. Although the best one to explain it will be Guillaume Verdon, one of the authors and experts in QML.
Wait, there is more. Can we learn quantum advantage by learning from experiments? YES. Google has proven that (quoted), “in various tasks, quantum machines can learn from exponentially fewer experiments than those required in conventional experiments. The exponential advantage holds in predicting properties of physical systems, performing quantum principal component analysis on noisy states, and learning approximate models of physical dynamics.” - This is big.
The Week in Quantum Computing
Microsoft aims to win the race to build a new kind of computer. So does Amazon
The tech giants are locked in a race. It might not end for another decade, and there might not be just one winner. But, at the finish line, the prize they promise is a speedy machine, a quantum computer, that will crack in minutes problems that can’t be solved at all today.
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June 07, 2022 at 09:30AM
When to use a quantum computer
No, I am not referring to the strange phenomena of quantum mechanics that govern the operation of quantum computers. I am referring to the discrepancies in media coverage. In the popular media, quantum computing is touted as a magic device that will solve all our problems.
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June 07, 2022 at 09:30AM
Quantum microphone lets humans hear the advantage of quantum technologies
Online conferences have become essential to work. However, these meetings become annoying if the audio quality is noisy due to poor performance of the microphones.
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June 07, 2022 at 09:30AM
Quantropi at CANSEC to Urge Canadian Defense Sector to Prepare for Quantum Threat
OTTAWA, June 01, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Quantropi Inc., a Canadian quantum cybersecurity innovator, today announced that it has collaborated with Calian Group, a diverse products and services company providing innovative solutions for the communications, learning and security sectors, and Deutsche Telekom, one of the world's leading integrated telecommunications companies, to benchmark the performance of Quantropi’s quantum-secure cryptography technology. The company will appear alongside Calian at CANSEC, Canada's largest global defence & security trade show, June 1 – 2, 2022, to raise awareness of the looming quantum cryptographic threat known as Y2Q.
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June 07, 2022 at 09:30AM
Paper: Defining Quantum Games
In this article, we explore the concept of quantum games and define quantum games as any type of playable games that are related to or reference quantum physics through any of three proposed aspects. The rise of the quantum computers has made it possible to think about a new wave of computer games, namely quantum computer games, games on quantum computers. But at the same time, there are also various games that are exploring quantum mechanics and related topics through digital, analogue and hybrid means. In this article we go through the emerging body of quantum games, the history of quantum games and the different ways a game may be considered a quantum game. For this we propose three dimensions for analysing and defining the phenomenon of quantum games: the perceivable dimension of quantum games, the dimension of quantum technologies and the dimension of scientific purposes.
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June 07, 2022 at 09:30AM
Paper: Quantum agents in the Gym: a variational quantum algorithm for deep Q-learning
Quantum machine learning (QML) has been identified as one of the key fields that could reap advantages from near-term quantum devices, next to optimization and quantum chemistry. Research in this area has focused primarily on variational quantum algorithms (VQAs), and several proposals to enhance supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms with VQAs have been put forward. Out of the three, RL is the least studied and it is still an open question whether VQAs can be competitive with state-of-the-art classical algorithms based on neural networks (NNs) even on simple benchmark tasks. In this work, we introduce a training method for parametrized quantum circuits (PQCs) that can be used to solve RL tasks for discrete and continuous state spaces based on the deep Q-learning algorithm. We investigate which architectural choices for quantum Q-learning agents are most important for successfully solving certain types of environments by performing ablation studies for a number of different data encoding and readout strategies. We provide insight into why the performance of a VQA-based Q-learning algorithm crucially depends on the observables of the quantum model and show how to choose suitable observables based on the learning task at hand. To compare our model against the classical DQN algorithm, we perform an extensive hyperparameter search of PQCs and NNs with varying numbers of parameters. We confirm that similar to results in classical literature, the architectural choices and hyperparameters contribute more to the agents' success in a RL setting than the number of parameters used in the model. Finally, we show when recent separation results between classical and quantum agents for policy gradient RL can be extended to inferring optimal Q-values in restricted families of environments.
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June 07, 2022 at 06:30PM
Why Quantum Software will be Eating the World
In the decade since Marc Andreesen published “Why software will be eating the world”, he was proven right. Indeed, software companies - from Netflix to Amazon, from Pixar to LinkedIn, from Gong to Snowflake - have completely disrupted numerous industries.
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June 07, 2022 at 06:30PM
Why analog neutral atoms quantum computing is the most promising direction for early quantum advantage
Long before digital computers took the world by storm, analog machines were helping humans model the world. The subtle nature of quantum physics invites us to revisit the distinction between digital and analog.
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June 08, 2022 at 08:30AM
QuantWare awarded €7.5M from the European Innovation Council to rapidly scale superconducting quantum processors
Delft Quantum Startup QuantWare awarded €7.5M from the European Innovation Council to rapidly scale superconducting quantum processors DELFT, NETHERLANDS - QuantWare, a leading provider of superconducting quantum processors, has been awarded €7.
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June 08, 2022 at 01:30PM
Ministry of Defence acquires government's first quantum computer
The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has acquired the government's first quantum computer. Quantum computers can make very complex calculations extremely quickly and their creators say they can solve the problems regular computers cannot.
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June 09, 2022 at 09:30AM
Joint Statement of the United States of America and Denmark on Cooperation in Quantum Information Science and Technology
The text of the following joint statement was released by the Governments of the United States of America and Denmark.
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June 09, 2022 at 12:30PM
The race toward a new computing technology is heating up — and Asia is jumping on the trend
Quantum computing was already gathering pace in Japan and elsewhere in Asia when the University of Tokyo and IBM launched their new quantum computer last year. The computer was the second such system built outside the United States by IBM — the latest in a string of key moves in quantum research.
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June 09, 2022 at 05:30PM
Introducing the largest quantum photonic processor to date
Quantum computers promise to propel computing far beyond what today's computers are capable of, but this potential has yet to be realized.
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June 09, 2022 at 05:30PM
Photonic quantum startup ORCA Computing raises $15m Series A
London-based ORCA Computing, Europe’s leading full-stack photonic quantum computing company, has announced a $15m Series A funding round.
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June 09, 2022 at 08:30PM
Computer scientists crash the Solvay Conference
Thanks so much to everyone who sent messages of support following my last post! I vowed there that I’m going to stop letting online trolls and sneerers occupy so much space in my mental world.
“[…] I’m a theoretical physicist, I’m in a completely different field, and I was still able to learn Shor’s algorithm in about half an hour, that’s how easy this stuff is. I took a look at some of your papers on arXiv and the math really doesn’t get any more advanced than linear algebra.[…] “
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June 10, 2022 at 09:30AM
Quantum advantage in learning from experiments
Quantum technology promises to revolutionize how we learn about the physical world. An experiment that processes quantum data with a quantum computer could have substantial advantages over conventional experiments in which quantum states are measured and outcomes are processed with a classical computer. We proved that quantum machines could learn from exponentially fewer experiments than the number required by conventional experiments. This exponential advantage is shown for predicting properties of physical systems, performing quantum principal component analysis, and learning about physical dynamics. Furthermore, the quantum resources needed for achieving an exponential advantage are quite modest in some cases. Conducting experiments with 40 superconducting qubits and 1300 quantum gates, we demonstrated that a substantial quantum advantage is possible with today’s quantum processors.
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June 10, 2022 at 11:30AM
‘Angel particle’ mimics may be first step to reliable quantum computers
Scientists say they have created a stable state in the subatomic world using “dark matter” physics that could open the way to more reliable and robust quantum computers.
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June 10, 2022 at 07:30PM
Paper: Quantum Advantage in Cryptography
Ever since its inception, cryptography has been caught in a vicious circle: Cryptographers keep inventing methods to hide information, and cryptanalysts break them, prompting cryptographers to invent even more sophisticated encryption schemes, and so on. But could it be that quantum information technology breaks this circle? At first sight, it looks as if it just lifts the competition between cryptographers and cryptanalysts to the next level. Indeed, quantum computers will render most of today's public key cryptosystems insecure. Nonetheless, there are good reasons to believe that cryptographers will ultimately prevail over cryptanalysts. Quantum cryptography allows us to build communication schemes whose secrecy relies only on the laws of physics as well as some minimum assumptions about the cryptographic hardware - leaving basically no room for an attack. While we are not yet there, this article provides an overview of the principles and state of the art of quantum cryptography.
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June 11, 2022 at 08:30AM
Financial Firms Seek Edge in Algorithms Inspired by Quantum Computing
Quantum-inspired technology is a broad term that relates to using certain algorithms that typically run on quantum computers on fast-processing classical computers instead.
”Mr. Muthukrishnan said that he hasn’t yet found a quantum-inspired solution that functions so much better than a traditional equation that he has to rush to implement it.”
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June 11, 2022 at 08:30AM
Qubit Pharmaceuticals, a quantum physics-based drug discovery company, raises €16M
Drug candidate selection 2 times faster and investment divided by 10 thanks to computing power multiplied by 100,000
Objective of 10 drug discovery programs in cancer and inflammatory diseases
A seed round that brings together Octave Klaba and the XAnge, Omnes and Quantonation funds
Paris (France) and Boston (USA), June 10th, 2022 – Qubit Pharmaceuticals, a deeptech company specializing in molecular simulation and modeling using quantum physics, announces that is has raised €16.1 million from XAnge, Omnes, Quantonation and Mr. Octave Klaba, founder of OVH. This seed round with investors specialized in Life Sciences and Deep Tech brings the total amount raised since the company’s creation in 2020 to more than €23 million.
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June 11, 2022 at 09:30PM