Earlier this year, NASA, in partnership with Google, acquired the world's largest quantum computer. But just what does the space agency plan to do with a device with such revolutionary potential? We talked to one of their lead researchers to find out.
I spoke to Dr. Rupak Biswas, deputy director of the Exploration Technology Directorate at NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley. Biswas and his team are hammering away at a D-Wave quantum system that's currently crunching away at a modest 512 qubits. It may be small, but it became clear during our conversation that NASA has big plans for quantum computation — plans that will involve everything from managing huge repositories of data through to space exploration and the coordination of space-based robotic rovers.
Indeed, quantum systems have the potential — at least theoretically — to irrevocably change the way we go about computation. Unlike traditional silicon-based computers (or carbon nanotube computers for that matter), these systems tap into the eerie effects of quantum mechanics (namely superposition, entanglement, and parallelism), enabling them to mull over all possible solutions to a problem in a single instant.
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