![[IOP]](http://images.iop.org/cws/icons/themes/phw/colophon-small.png){kind=icon}
Tag archives: Google
Google’s ‘supreme’ 20-qubit quantum computer
Quantum cohort: John Martinis (right) and some of his team.
(Courtesy: Matt Perko)
By Tushna Commissariat in New Orleans, Louisiana, US
“We should have a 20-qubit chip ready very soon… in the next two months most likely,” says Google’s John Martinis to me as we lean against a wall in a relatively quiet corner of the sprawling convention centre in New Orleans. Martinis, a tall man with a mop of silver hair and an Alan Alda-esque manner, is very busy and I’m lucky to have caught him. Earlier that day, he gave one of the APS March Meeting‘s most popular talks on “quantum supremacy: checking a quantum computer with a classical supercomputer”. Martinis, whose team is based at the University of California Santa Barbara, spoke about how they are working towards developing a “scientifically and commercially useful quantum computer” made up of 50 qubits – a 7 by 7 array of superconducting qubits (each of which is coupled to its nearest neighbour) that can be programmed with a one or two-qubit gate – which has an error rate of about 0.1% and can actually do quantum computations.
View all posts by this author | View this author's profile
Go wins for Google AI program
Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo programme has won the first two games against Go champion Lee Sedol from South Korea. (Courtesy: iStock/Peerayot)
By Michael Banks
It is a battle between man and machine, but one that has been ultimately won by the brute force of computation.
Yesterday as well as today, Google’s DeepMind AlphaGo program has made a breakthrough in artificial intelligence by defeating Lee Sedol – the current world champion from South Korea – at the game of Go.
View all posts by this author | View this author's profile
Join CERN’s scavenger hunt
Can you spot all 20 or so LEGO figurines in the CERN computing centre?
By Michael Banks
You may remember that late last year CERN teamed up with Google Street View to allow users to go on a virtual tour of the lab, including 12 km of the 27 km Large Hadron Collider (LHC) tunnel plus the caverns that house the ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE experiments.
This involved Google‘s Zurich team spending two weeks at CERN in 2011 photographing the LHC using a “Street View Trike” – a specially created camera-mounted bike.
Well, what we didn’t known then was that Stefan Lüders, CERN’s computer security officer, had decided to stash about 20 LEGO figurines around the CERN computing centre before the cameras rolled.
View all posts by this author | View this author's profile
