Companies, countries battle to develop quantum computers | 60 Minutes

artificial intelligence is the magic of the moment but this is a story about what's next something incomprehensible tomorrow IBM will announce and advance in an entirely new kind of computing one that may solve problems in minutes that would take today's supercomputers millions of years that's the difference in Quantum computing a technology being developed at IBM Google and others it's named for quantum physics which describes the forces of the subatomic realm the science is deep and we can't scratch the surface but we hope to explain enough so that you won't be blindsided by a breakthrough that could transform civilization the story will continue in a moment the quantum computer pushes the limits of knowledge new science new engineering all leading to this processor that computes with the atomic forces that created the universe I think this moment it feels to us like the Pioneers on the 1940s and 50s that were building the first digital computers Dario Gill is something of a Quantum Crusader Spanish born with a PhD in electrical engineering Gil is head of research at IBM how much faster is this than say the world's best supercomputer today we are now in a stage where we can do certain calculations with these systems that would take the biggest supercomputers in the world to be able to do some similar calculation but the beauty of it is that we see that we're going to continue to expand that capability such that not even a million or a billion of those supercomputers connected together could do the calculations of these future machines so we've come a long way and the most exciting part is that we have a road map and a journey right now where that is going to continue to increase at a rate that is going to be shocking I'm not sure the world is prepared for this change definit not to understand the change go back to 1947 and the invention of a switch called a transistor the transistor a new name computers have processed information on transistors ever since getting faster as more transistors were squeezed onto a chip billions of them today but it takes that many because each transistor holds information in only two states it's either on or it's off like a coin heads or tails Quantum abandons transistors and encodes information on electrons that behave like this coin we created with animation electrons behave in a way so that they are heads and tails and everything in between you've gone from handling one bit of information at a time on a transistor to exponential more data you can see that there is fantastic amount of information stored when you can look at all possible angles not just up or down physicist miio Kaku of the City University of New York already calls today's computers classical he uses a maze to explain quantum's difference let's look at a classical computer calculating how a mouse navigates a maze it is pain pain f one by one it has to map every single left turn right turn left turn right turn before it finds the goal now a quantum computer scans all possible routes simultaneously this is amazing how many turns are there hundreds of possible turns right quantum computers do it all at once kaku's book titled Quantum Supremacy explains the stakes we're looking at a race a race between China between IBM Google Microsoft Honeywell all the big boys who are in this race to create a workable operationally efficient quantum computer because the nation or company that does this will rule the world economy but a reliable general purpose quantum computer is a tough climb yet maybe that's why this wall is in the lobby of Google Quantum lab in California here we got an inside look starting with a microscope's view of what replaces the transistor this right here is one cubit and this is another Cubit this is a 5 Cubit chain those crosses at the bottom are cubits short for Quantum bits they hold the electrons and act like artificial atoms unlike transistors each additional Cubit do doues the computer's power it's exponential so while 20 transistors are 20 times more powerful than one 20 cubits are a million times more powerful than one so this gets positioned right here on the fridge and Karina Chow Chief Operating Officer of Google's lab showed us the processor that holds the qits much of that above chills the qits to what physicists call near absolute zero near absolute zero I understand is about 460 degrees below 0o Fahrenheit so that's about as cold as anything can get yes almost as cold as possible that temperature inside a sealed computer is one of the coldest places in the universe the Deep Freeze eliminates electrical resistance and isolates the cubits from outside vibrations so they can be controlled with an electromagnetic field the cubits must vibrate in unison but that's a tough trick called coherence once you've achieved coherence of the cubits how easy is that to maintain it's really hard um coherence is very challenging coherence is fleeting in all similar machines coherence breaks down constantly creating errors we're making a about one error in every hundred or so steps ultimately we think we're going to need about one error in every million or so steps that would probably be identified as one of the biggest barriers mitigating those errors and extending coherence time while scaling up to larger machines are the challenges facing German American scientist hartm mot Nevan who founded Google's lab and its casual style in 2012 can the problems that are in the way of quantum Computing be solved I should confess my subtitle here is Chief optimist so after having said this I would say at this point we don't need any more fundamental breakthroughs we need little improvements here and there we have all the pieces together we just need to integrate them well to build larger and larger systems and you think that all of this will be integrated into a system in what period of time yeah we we often say we want to do it by the end of the decade so that we can use this Kennedy quote and get it done by the end of the decade the end of this decade yes five or six years yes that's about the timeline Dario Gil predicts and the IBM research director told us something surprising there are problems that classical computers can never solve never solve and I think this is an important point because we're accustomed to saying ah computers get better actually there are many many problems that are so complex that we can make that statement that actually classical computers will never be able to solve that problem not now not a 100 years from now not a thousand years from now you actually require a different way to represent information and process information that's what Quantum gives you there's not a Quantum could give us answers to Impossible problems in physics chemistry engineering and Medicine which is why IBM and Cleveland Clinic have installed one of the first quantum computers to leave the lab for the real world takes time it takes way too much time to find the solutions we need right now we sat down with Dario Gil and Dr sill SRO Chief research officer at Cleveland Clinic she told us healthc care would be transformed if quantum computers can model the behavior of proteins the molecules that regulate all life proteins change shape to change function in ways too complex to follow and when they get it wrong that causes disease it takes on many shapes many many shapes depending upon what it's doing and where it is and which other protein it's with I need to understand the shape it's in when it's doing an interaction or a function that I don't want it to do for that patient cancer autoimmunity it's a problem we are limited completely by the computational ability to look at the structure in real time for any even one molecule Cleveland Clinic is so proud of its quantum computer they set it up in a Lobby behind the glass that shiny silver cylinder encloses the kind of cooling system and process processor you saw earlier Quantum is not solving the protein problem yet this is more of a trial run to introduce researchers to quantum's potential the people using this machine are they having to learn an entirely different way to communicate with a computer I think that's what's really nice that you actually just use a regular laptop and you write a program uh very much like you would write a traditional program but when you you know click you know go and run it just happens to run on a very different kind of computer there are a half dozen competing designs in the race China named Quantum a top National priority and the US government is spending nearly a billion dollars a year on research the first change comes next year when the US publishes new standards for encryption because Quantum is expected one day to break the codes that lock everything from National secrets to credit cards tomorrow IBM will unveil its Quantum system 2 with three times the cubits as the machine you saw in Cleveland this past August we saw system 2 Under Construction it's a machine unlike anything we've ever built and this is it this is it IBM's Dario Gill told us system 2 has the room to expand to thousands of cubits what are the chances that this is one of those things that's going to be ready in 5 years and always will be we don't see an obstacle right now that will prevent us from Building Systems that will have tens of thousands and even 100 thousand cubits working with each other so we are highly confident what we will get there of all the amazing things we heard it was physicist meio Kaku who led us down the path to the biggest idea of all he said we were walking through a quantum computer processing information with subatomic particles is how the universe works you know when I look at the night sky I See Stars I look at the flowers the trees I realize that it's all Quantum the Splendor of the universe itself the language of the universe is the language of the quantum learning that language may bring more than inconceivable speed reverse engineering Nature's computer could be a window on creation itself