Amazon Is Laying the Groundwork for Its Own Quantum Computer

Amazon is laying the groundwork for a quantum computer, deepening efforts to harness technology that can crunch in seconds vast amounts of data that take even the most powerful supercomputers hours or days to process. From a report: Amazon has been hiring for a Quantum Hardware Team within its Amazon Web Services Center for Quantum Computing, according to internal job postings and information on LinkedIn. Marc Runyan, a former engineer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, lists his title on the professional social network as senior quantum research scientist at Amazon and describes his role as "helping to design and build a quantum computer for Amazon Web Services." [...] Among Amazon's recent hires are research scientists focusing on designing a new superconducting quantum device as well as device fabrication. Developing its own quantum computer would let Amazon more closely mirror the approach taken by its major cloud rivals. International Business Machines first made a quantum computer available to the public in 2016 and has rolled out regular upgrades.

They're up to no good

[GameboyRMH]

They're going to use this computer to model all of reality so that they can predict the future of union organization and monopoly-busting government actions...and maybe what people are shopping for too I guess.

Quantum != faster

[Immerman]

Why is it that practically every article about quantum computers makes them out to be some kind of number-crunching beast? Unless I've missed a memo for a typical workload, particularly most number-crunching applications, a quantum computer won't be any faster than a traditional computer at the same clock speed (and last I checked, quantum computers are still operating at much slower clock speeds).

Where QCs potentially have a massive advantage is for very particular workloads, particularly various kinds of

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[timeOday]

Searching a large solution space efficiently is just a particular problem? That's basically any NP problem. Heck there would hardly be polynomial time solutions to anything if we stopped using simplistic approximations to everything because they're faster to solve.

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[Immerman]

Yes, it is. Simulations, neural networks, even a great many optimization problem don't lend themselves to the particular kind of optimizations that QC *might* make possible.

And it's not like QC eliminates the difficulty - it simply reduces the complexity of some kinds of tasks, generally based on the size of the computer. An example I recall from long ago is finding an item in an unsorted list - an O(N) problem with traditional computers that's reduced to O(sqrt(N)) by quantum computers (the answer is th

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[ceoyoyo]

Problem is, quantum computers are generally crap at searching large solution spaces efficiently, unless it's a very specific type of problem that maps well into the very strict limitations of quantum computing.

Is Quantum Computing used in the real world?

[alkurta]

This sounds promising, but then again, all articles about quantum computing seem to be full of promise. Every article I read about QC seems to tout that 'someday' quantum computers will solve previously unsolvable problems. Is any of this happening in the real world? Either in business or academia?

Re:

[GameboyRMH]

Google and Lockheed-Martin have used them to optimize neural network applications.

Already activated?

[Tablizer]

I just checked the location of my package, and it's two places at once.

Delivery routes

[irlanthos]

Amazon makes deliveries. one of the oldest classic hard to crunch problem is the travelling salesman problem, or in this case the delivery truck problem. Now they'll be able to find the optimal delivery route for a set of addresses in almost zero time. :-)

It's pretty simple, really.

[CaptainLugnuts]

Amazon is under contract from the US government to make the technology to break into encrypted VMs.

Quantum mechanic

[backslashdot]

Good time to get that Quantum mechanic diploma. Or not. Or both not and not not.

I can't order that

[Lost Penguin]

Dave, you don't need the heated socks.

The real reason

[dsgrntlxmply]

Bezos forgot his Bitcoin password and is trying to recover it.