I was watching my local news broadcast this evening and learned that D-Wave of Burnaby, BC Canada is getting ready to sell the world’s first commercial quantum computer in 2010. Not sure if the CEO said he was betting on selling one or if he actually had a buyer lined up but I do recall him talking about Google’s interest.
If successful in creating and selling a commercial quantum computing system they will completely revolutionize computing as we know it. Just one of these quantum computer systems will be able to replace tens of thousands of high powered computers all linked together as a a super computer. As if that wasn’t enough the quantum computer would even do the same workload faster, no wonder Google is interested.
I have always maintained that search engines would probably be the organizational body behind the discovery of true artificial intelligence and with the once theoretical quantum computer providing the computational power, I think that AI may become a reality sooner than later.
Now I am not saying that Google itself will be the search technology to solve true artificial intelligence but rather I am saying that search algorithms will provide the “synaptic connections” that will eventually result AI.
The final piece to the AI equation, in my opinion, is semantic search. Armed with quantum computers to provide the rapid processing of the collective stores of data, I feel that true semantic search will be solved in short order and artificial intelligence will quickly follow it up.
Who can say what the future holds in store for us but one thing is sure, computing change is coming and if the next few years of growth is anything like the past few years, we can certainly foresee some very big things on the horizon.
