Quantum Computer Accurately Simulates Hydrogen Molecule, Could Revolutionize Many Industries

[Lucian Armasu]

Google and a team of researchers from various universities managed to simulate the hydrogen molecule on a quantum computer for the first time.

Quantum Computer Accurately Simulates Hydrogen Molecule, Could Revolutionize Many Industries : Read more

 

[targetdrone]

"Classical computers aren’t that good at simulating chemical reactions. For instance, accurately computing the energies of the propane molecule (C3H8) takes ten days with a classic computer design."


Some actual computing specs would be nice to get some perspective.

 

[itsnotmeitsyou]

Research computer simulation is often done on cluster-supercomputers. Assuming that the best anyone can get is 10days, I'm sure they weren't trying this on some i7/Xeon desktop. It was probably run on a cluster of 100-1000 processors in a university high-performance computing lab.

 

[Slatteew]

One thing i'm curious about is how quantum computing can overcome Chaos. Chaos in the context of Chaos Theory and the difficulty of modeling complex systems. On computers today, precision in the amount of digits makes calculation and modeling of many complex systems impossible because approximately the same starting points will produce radically different outcomes based on small discrepancies in the calculation and round off. From what I understand of quantum computing and this article, it may be able to have the precision, power, and much lower time necessary to effectively negate Chaos? Color me skeptical........maybe in some systems it'll work, but most complex systems will stump it and will exhibit Chaos.

 

[desolation0]

SLATTEEW - The intermediary variables in quantum computing are held in the properties of the quantum system. That system is not limited to digital precision. Assuming the program is within the scope of being solvable by that system in one pass, there is no need for intermediate rounding errors that come up in classical computing from the need to store the variables between process clocks. Only when we finally set a classical computer to interpret the results for us is that rounding error finally introduced again. This doesn't remove all potential for chaos, but does reduce one of the causes for it.

 

[Slatteew]

DESOLATION0 - Thank you for your response. Very informative. I'm not up to snuff on all things Quantum Computing so idk about some of the things you talked about. But that's good to know and I'd also agree it would reduce some, if not at least 1 of the causes of Chaos in our calculations and simulations.

 

[photonboy]

Chaos isn't an issue if you choose your problems appropriately. There are many types of problems that are unsuitable to a quantum computer.

I still don't understand how the lack of memory is going to be resolved for anything more than very simple problems.

 

[hoofhearted]

Good reads for QCL (Quantum Computing Language) (Shor and Grover):
http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/quprog/node17.html
http://tph.tuwien.ac.at/~oemer/doc/quprog/node18.html

 

[rush21hit]

Pardon my dumb question, but why is it GPGPU or GPU computing deemed inadequate for such task?

 

[ledude]

Will this enable us to download more RAM?

 

[PoweredByLight]

QM is just math, not reality. It fails on many levels such as ionization energies (QM software relies on data sets calculated from trials over many years- not closed-form solutions). A classical computer running Millsian software can already calculate in real-time molecules as complex as insulin, including all binding energies. Whatever anyone thinks of the developers theoretical ideas, the software just works.

 

[PoweredByLight]

Classical computer can render complex molecules in almost real-time. All this "superposition" stuff is just from math, not the physical reality the very real particles occupy. See for example: http://www.millsian.com/

 

[rush21hit]

Thank you, PoweredByLight. My points exactly.

The way I see it, glorifying early quantum computing results is like a made up superstition under the assumption that any computational prowess exist in the industry today deemed inadequate. While, it might be true to some degree, I'd say its entirely about software and programming and finally the hardware they chose to use. The power is there, its how you use it. Processing efficiency entirely depends on it.

But don't get me wrong. I like the idea of quantum computing exist. I just don't like it when people spread some early result it had and tell other people that no tech today can do that. To my understanding, quantum computing still has a lot of catching up to do. And surely these same people underestimate the raw processing power of today's standard. Even more astounding as what marginally lower profile of GPU Compute achieved over cluster upon cluster of previous solutions.
Do people even realizes how much effort goes into visualizing and simulating a blackhole in all its glory in 3D physics environment?
Do they even realize how much processing power a Tesla card has? Each generation is an engineering marvel of their time.
Also, the reliance upon CPU as main processing power has long gone. We now do it with maximum parallelism. In fact, this very method has been used since earliest super computer was born, which essentially lots of CPU stacked together to behave as one single unit.

I expect in the future, quantum computing will simply be part of those cluster and used for very specific tasks. The thing just very different than binary computing the industry does. How will they do it is beyond me tho...

Or maybe I miss something here, and my assertion is entirely wrong. Which is the point of quantum computing in the first place. Then please, tell me.
*This science stuff excites me

 

[Mboettcher]

Simulating this molecule is one of the Holy Grails of modern engineering/science. This is a major milestone and neither Tom's nor Google are understating the degree it could revolutionize all those fields. Granted this is more proof of concept than anything but, if the computing technology is scalable, it changes every industry.

As a historical reference, we are in a current era that is similar to the "tyranny of numbers" era in classical computers ended by the invention of the transistor cut into the silicon chip.

 

[Kewlx25]

Classical computer can render complex molecules in almost real-time. All this "superposition" stuff is just from math, not the physical reality the very real particles occupy. See for example: http://www.millsian.com/

Particles aren't real, just overly simplistic representations of the "waves" reality is made of. Modern CPU design had to stop using classical ideas of particles years ago when quantum tunneling started to create electrical leaking issues. This is why we use finfet now. Quantum super-position math works perfectly as far as we can tell.

 

[bit_user]

The way I see it, glorifying early quantum computing results is like a made up superstition under the assumption that any computational prowess exist in the industry today deemed inadequate.
...
Do they even realize how much processing power a Tesla card has?

Do you even realize you're glorifying GPU computing in the same way?
; )

The reason people are interested in quantum computing is that it scales exponentially with the number of qubits, allowing it to tackle problems that can't be solved by simple scaling of conventional computers.

BTW, the bigger you try to scale a conventional computer, the less efficient it becomes. This is more of an issue for some types of problems than others, but parallelism is not a panacea.