“My colleagues and I instead hope to build the first dedicated neural network computer, using the latest ‘quantum’ technology rather than AI software,” wrote Michael Hartman, a professor at Heriot-Watt University who is in charge of the research. By combining these two branches of computing, we hope to achieve a new breakthrough that brings us to artificial intelligence that works at unprecedented speed and makes complex decisions automatically in a very short period of time. "
Neural Networks is a type of machine learning algorithm inspired from the way the brain works, learning by examples to deal with new cases. Quantum computers take advantage of subatomic particles that can change their status each time to circumvent the limitations of old-fashioned binary codes.
Hartmann believes that, by combining these two types of computers, his team will be able to start a new era in artificial intelligence research that will allow the control and management of very complex problems, such as directing traffic flow for an entire city in real-time.
To this day, quantum computers still struggle to address problems that are too simple for traditional computers. But Hartmann and his team are preparing for the next step that will lead to a new era of artificial intelligence systems.
“To put the technology to its full use will involve creating larger devices, a process that may take ten years or more as many technical details need to be very precisely controlled to avoid computational errors,” Hartmann wrote. “But once we have shown that quantum neural networks can be more powerful than classical AI software in a real world application, it would very quickly become some of the most important technology out there.”
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