Quantum Limbo. Google, NASA, Buckaroo Banzai and the Government Shutdown

There is a Canadian company called D-Wave Systems which has claimed for several years now to build actual quantum computers. Nebulous mystery surrounds their claims, given that it is extremely difficult to determine whether their D-Wave 1 and 2 contraptions are actually making use of the quirky thing that is quantum reality. Because, well, you know, it’s both at the same time, Schrödinger, Heisenberg, Feynman, who famously said: “If you think you understand quantum mechanics, you don’t understand quantum mechanics.” It’s a recursive problem, which means it’s a recursive problem. Entanglement and superposition. Superstition, too.

A Bloch Sphere, the geometrical representation of the pure state space of a two-level quantum mechanical system (qubit), named after the physicist Felix Bloch.

The basic idea of quantum computing is that while traditional computers work by crunching through sequences of 0 and 1 bits, which store information in transistors, a quantum computer makes use of so-called qubits, which can be 0 and 1 at the same time, therefore speeding up the processing time in an unimaginable way. Latest tests run on the D-Wave 2 suggest it can solve equations with up to 100 variables 3600 faster than a normal computer, so half an hour becomes half a second. A working quantum computer would of course therefore also mean the definitive end of all public key cryptography. Other tests suggest it is no faster than a cell phone.

D-Wave Systems is intriguing, because in its secrecy, it is reminiscent of a company like Yoyodyne in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 or the greatest movie of all time, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai’s Across the 8th Dimension (1984), starring Peter Weller.

It is not surprising at all that Google recently bought the D-Wave 2, after defence company Lockheed Martin already started using the D-Wave 1 in 2011. Google uses it in its Ames Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab in collaboration with NASA.

Quantum computers make use of ambiguity and instability, if you will. So you can imagine how fragile the technical environment is. They operate at near-zero Kelvin. The problem being that a large portion of the team calibrating the D-Wave 2 is NASA personnel and just got suspended by the government shutdown.

“The lab is shut down, but the computer itself is still accessible and working,” says Google spokeswoman Krisztina Radosavljevic-Szilagyi. She couldn’t confirm, however, that her company is actually running experiments on the machine. It’s not even clear what sort of stuff Google plans on doing with the machine when Ames is running at full tilt. There are some rumours, but it seems that first of all, they are working on figuring out what it actually is that the machine can do. This, in turn, seems like a sci fi movie in which an alien technology is found on the bottom of the sea (like Megatron) or crash-landed in the desert near Area 51, and then tested. I think the machine is trying to figure out what we can do. It orchestrated the government shutdown to finally be left alone and go about its bidding.

The limbo entangles and superposes many levels of reality, from the quantum reality of qubits and Bloch spheres to the economic and political spheres of the government shutdown.

Google has released a cringeworthy video, which you can find here:

http://video.wired.com/watch/google-and-nasa-s-quantum-artificial-intelligence-lab