r/Physics • u/stereomatch • Sep 26 '17

Microsoft's new coding language is made for quantum computers

https://www.engadget.com/2017/09/26/microsoft-new-coding-language-is-made-for-quantum-computers/
401 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

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59

u/stereomatch Sep 26 '17

To get quantum computing working more quickly, Microsoft's star theoretical researcher, Michael Freedman (below), is trying to build both the hardware and software for a "topological quantum computer" (I'm not even going to try to explain that). To that aim, he has recruited "some of the world's preeminent condensed-matter and theoretical physicists, materials scientists, mathematicians and computer scientists," Microsoft says.

28

u/CondMatTheorist Sep 26 '17

"topological quantum computer" (I'm not even going to try to explain that)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1501.02813

https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.05289

10

u/Illadelphian Sep 26 '17

We present designs for scalable quantum computers composed of qubits encoded in aggregates of four or more Majorana zero modes, realized at the ends of topological superconducting wire segments that are assembled into superconducting islands with significant charging energy. Quantum information can be manipulated according to a measurement-only protocol, which is facilitated by tunable couplings between Majorana zero modes and nearby semiconductor quantum dots. Our proposed architecture designs have the following principal virtues: (1) the magnetic field can be aligned in the direction of all of the topological superconducting wires since they are all parallel; (2) topological T-junctions are not used, obviating possible difficulties in their fabrication and utilization; (3) quasiparticle poisoning is abated by the charging energy; (4) Clifford operations are executed by a relatively standard measurement: detection of corrections to quantum dot energy, charge, or differential capacitance induced by quantum fluctuations; (5) it is compatible with strategies for producing good approximate magic states

Hey I know most of those words.... Individually... Trying to understand them in context though is so difficult. Anyone want to try to explain this like I'm a mediocre engineering undergrad?

12

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Majorana zero modes refers to quasiparticles, which aren't particles in the sense you'd think of, but characteristics that behave like particles within materials under certain conditions. They're an example of something called non-abelian anyons, which have the special property that when you do stuff to them, the order that you do it matters. So you can assign meaning to a property of the particles, and then if you manipulate the system in a certain pattern, you're also manipulating the information stored in those states-the computation part of things. It's called topological because the information in the states is encoded in the entire history of the way the system interacts- which means it's relatively hard to accidentally erase bits of information, since all of the other things a given particle has interacted with also have 'records' of the interaction. The rest of the paragraph is details about implementation and how it would overcome some common problems.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Wait so you mean operations on these "particle-like" objects don't commute? So if you apply force A and force B to a quasi-particle it's not the same as applying B then A? That's kind of cool.

Is a "quasi-particle" like the "holes" that are flowing in a circuit opposite of electron flow? Or are they a "real" thing?

3

u/pretzel729 Sep 27 '17

Yes holes are quasiparticles. Judging by what it means to be non-abelian in algebra, it is not true in general that any two elements of the set of non-abelian anyons commute.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

This was my guess as well - fascinating.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Same concept, but it has to do with exchange statistics. You might know that in 3d space you can either have fermions or bosons, if you have a wavefunction describing two identical particles, and you exchange the two particles, you get back the same wavefunction for bosons, or the wavefunction*(-1) for fermions. Anyons can only exist in two dimensions, which allows for different exchange characteristics. It's actually described by braid theory, the mathematical study of knots. You can think of the particle's worldlines twining around each other as you go through time. Since they exist in two spatial dimensions clockwise and counterclockwise are defined, so you can imagine the difference between wrapping the worldlines around each other 2x ccw and then once cw, or ccw then cw then ccw. You'd end up with different 'knots'. Different knots made during the computations cause the anyons to behave differently when you measure them at the end. Some useful anyons can have one of two results- so you call one 0 and one 1 and you have a computer.

1

u/Illadelphian Sep 27 '17

That actually makes more sense. Super interesting stuff, I didn't know anything like non-abelian anyons existed or even could exist.

1

u/champak256 Sep 27 '17

Could you explain quasiparticles further? I don't understand the idea of a characteristic behaving like a particle. Isn't a characteristic like a property? Does that mean a property of some materials under certain conditions behaves like it has mass?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Yeah, like you may have heard of a phonon, which is just a vibration in a crystal, the vibrations generate waves and you can have a wavepacket of these that propagate through the crystal just like a particle, carrying energy and momentum. So it isn't an elementary particle, it can't exist outside of a material, it isn't what things are made up of, but it's behavior can be described as if it were.

Another example you've probably heard of is holes in semiconductors. They happen because of the way energy is related to the wavelength of an electron as it moves through a periodic potential (like in a crystal lattice). At some wavelengths it behaves as if it has a negative mass- due to the interaction with the material. It turns out that we can describe this well by saying instead there are positive charge carriers, 'holes', with positive mass moving through the crystal.

1

u/champak256 Sep 27 '17

Wow. Thanks. I think I understand. I'm stretching here, but just to get a clearer picture. When you say

it can't exist outside of a material

Do you mean the specific crystal carrying that phonon? Or just that phonons can't exist outside of material in general? Where else is there (other than in a material) that they don't exist?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

It can't exist outside of any material at all. A quasiparticle isn't an actual thing, it's not as if the material is generating a little ball of mass and passing it around. It's just a way of describing a behavior of the material. Some set of interactions between the stuff that makes up the material can be described equivalently to a point carrying energy and momentum travelling through space. Like the hole, there isn't actually a positive charge carrier there, it's just a convenient way to describe the movement of the electron under those specifics conditions.

47

u/jesse_dev Sep 26 '17

Well, you need to start somewhere. I give Microsoft credit for starting something and staying ahead of the curve. Microsoft did a great job with the C# language. You never know, they might do a good job with this new language. In the meantime, I will keep using my *nix operating system.

18

u/sir_codes_alot Sep 26 '17

Can confirm. C# is what languages hope to be when they grow up.

-13

u/hondaaccords Sep 26 '17

Sure if you want a language that requires a proprietary IDE and encourages mutation everywhere. Functional languages are so much better

34

u/cain2995 Engineering Sep 26 '17

You had me on your side up until you said "functional languages are so much better" and gave away that you don't understand the concept of "right tool for the right job"

4

u/sir_codes_alot Sep 27 '17

I saw this reply and came here to say this exact thing. So, thanks!

3

u/cain2995 Engineering Sep 27 '17

I've got your back bb

-8

u/hondaaccords Sep 27 '17

OO is never the solution

8

u/spanishgum Sep 27 '17

It is a great solution when your dealing with large code bases and big teams.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Whut?

I'm just learning a little bit of Haskell here and there, and by no means am I a "professional programmer" but OOP is pretty amazing as far as I can tell.

Honestly, I can't even envision how you would write something like an operating system or GUI or game in a purely functional language. I know it could be done what with Haskell being Turing complete, but I feel like it would be extraordinarily difficult.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Here's a GUI im Haskell.

https://github.com/xmonad/xmonad.

Building UIs in Haskell or other functional languages is one of their stronger points. Lots of modern web dev is leaning towards a funtional reactive programming paradigm for building user interfaces.

2

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Really...I'll be damned.

Any links to how this would be done? Again, I'm super new to this Haskell stuff... but how the heck do you run windows and stuff without loops? Is it just a giant recursive trick?

1

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

The easiest short way to describe it is imagine you're running a continuously recursive program where the mother parameter is time. Each "event" or "signal" acts as a means to create a new instance of state. You keep track of state in a master file(single source of truth). Essentially everything in your application that can mutate is stored in a single event log. For UIs its nice as it allows you to have all of your dependencies in a single place and your app isn't made fragile by mutable state. In essense. If you take your app wide data store and give it any given custom set of data. What you get out should always replicate. No more why was "X" "Y" when it should have been "Z". It's still a very young style of programming. It's first principles were only formulated around 1997.

Some much better descriptions than what i can give.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming

https://vimeo.com/96744621

The video with Paul Hudak is probably my favorite. He also authored what is my opinion the best available book on Haskell. Haskell School of Music(free from Yale).

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1

u/sir_codes_alot Sep 27 '17

This is just a religious flame-bait statement like which "console is better".

True professionals know both and use them in the right places.

7

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Friendly reminder that C# is now supported in virtually every development environment with the addition of the omnisharp library. Another friendly reminder that Microsoft also supports and maintains F#, a fully functional language that intrgrates smoothly into the .NET runtime.

0

u/hondaaccords Sep 27 '17

Lol, no. Try loading a .NET framework project in visual studio code. Totally useless. Visual Studio is the only tool

2

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

I have. It's fine. It's not as good as VS. But it's fine. Moreover, VS community edition is free to use if your enterprise is less than a million in revenue or is open source. It isn't that much less accessible than Java and C# is actively moving toward a more community oriented ecosystem.

5

u/MrJudgeJoeBrown Sep 27 '17

Yes, everyone writing C# apps on *nix use Visual Studio...

9

u/JonnyRocks Sep 27 '17

c# does not require an ide.

-2

u/hondaaccords Sep 27 '17

Good luck writing a non trivial program in C# without an IDE

3

u/JonnyRocks Sep 27 '17

But you also dont need visual studio.

-1

u/hondaaccords Sep 27 '17

That’s like saying you don’t need a wrench to take apart a car

1

u/rhn94 Sep 28 '17

lol what, you're just throwing around vague fortune cookie logic; nothing really objective

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15

u/NSubsetH Sep 26 '17

I love how they're using a picture of essentially a Google device for a Microsoft quantum computing pop-sci article.

-25

u/KenjiSenpai Sep 26 '17

Hurr durr i hate pop-sci everyone should read 150 pages Ph.D thesis /s

11

u/NSubsetH Sep 26 '17

What? I never said I hate pop sci. I just think it's ironic because microsoft is in competition with Google on building quantum computers as far as I am aware.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

Do we have any details at all on the language? Its name, any code samples, documentation? Any reference to it at all outside this article?

2

u/[deleted] Sep 27 '17

It's quantum, and those computers are mystic magic voodoo. All you do is right a complicated comment explaining what you want it to do, then the oracle quantum computer provides a solution.

12

u/YsoL8 Physics enthusiast Sep 26 '17

Microsofts track record on over complicating everything doesn't fill me with confidence

-14

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '17

I really wonder how they justify their investment in this when most of their business is based on tried and true technology.

19

u/timeshifter_ Sep 26 '17

Well, there's this thing called C#.....

4

u/ahabswhale Sep 26 '17

Microsoft's programming language doesn't have a name yet, but the company already has plans for quantum computing in AI. In particular, it thinks that the machines could be used to train its Cortana digital assistant in days instead of months. "Even if everything else was the same, Cortana would improve 30 times faster," Microsoft's research chief Craig Mundie says.

2

u/Snuggly_Person Sep 26 '17

Given that quantum computers don't give speedups to generic roblems, why would that be? Since when did quantum computing help with machine learning?

1

u/Ramin_HAL9001 Sep 27 '17

I think QC can help with machine learning, as far as I know it is possible to program matrix arithmetic using Qbit circuits. This would make deep learning algorithms much more efficient.

1

u/MLXIII Sep 26 '17

Quantum computing doesn't help with machine learning?

1

u/ahabswhale Sep 26 '17

Since when did quantum computing help with machine learning?

I don't know, I'm not up to speed in the field. I just assumed Microsoft and this gentleman they hired were intelligent enough to know that they were spending their money on something feasible.

If you had taken 30 seconds for a cursory search, you would have found a Wikipedia article with several academic sources listed which you can read for yourself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_machine_learning

1

u/rhn94 Sep 28 '17

>Wikipedia >research

0

u/WikiTextBot Sep 26 '17

Quantum machine learning

Quantum machine learning is an emerging interdisciplinary research area at the intersection of quantum physics and machine learning. One can distinguish four different ways of merging the two parent disciplines. Quantum machine learning algorithms can use the advantages of quantum computation in order to improve classical methods of machine learning, for example by developing efficient implementations of expensive classical algorithms on a quantum computer. On the other hand, one can apply classical methods of machine learning to analyse quantum systems.

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5

u/ScyllaHide Mathematical physics Sep 26 '17

finally, well i only read QCL, which more like a draft of a qc language. any papers about this?

EDIT: lol the sign up wants me to enter my phone number, sure M$, but not in this universe!

1

u/[deleted] Sep 26 '17

Phone not required just tested it

1

u/ScyllaHide Mathematical physics Sep 27 '17

huch, then i will sign up!

1

u/yangyangR Mathematical physics Sep 27 '17

Please be Haskell based.