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Category: computing

Winfried Hensinger is the director of the Sussex Centre for Quantum Technologies in England, and he has spent a lifetime devoted to studying the ins and outs of quantum mechanics and just what it can do for us. When Hensinger first started in the field, quantum computing was still very much a theory, but now it is all around us, and various projects are within reach of creating a universal quantum computer. So, now that scientists are taking quantum computing more seriously it won’t be long before the field begins to explode and applications that we never even imagined possible will become available to use.

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A competition pitting artificial intelligence (AI) against human players in the classic video game Doom has demonstrated just how advanced AI learning techniques have become – but it’s also caused considerable controversy.

While several teams submitted AI agents for the deathmatch, two students in the US have caught most of the flak, after they published a paper online detailing how their AI bot learned to kill human players in deathmatch scenarios.

The computer science students, Devendra Chaplot and Guillaume Lample, from Carnegie Mellon University, used deep learning techniques to train their AI bot – nicknamed Arnold – to navigate the 3D environment of the first-person shooter Doom.

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As the saying goes, “If you want something done right, you gotta do it yourself,” and it seems that you’ll soon be able to get a lot more done using artificially intelligent, high-tech exoskeleton Kindred. It’s the product of a startup created by quantum computing company D-Wave’s founder Geordie Rose, and according to the venture capital firm funding Kindred, the device “uses AI-driven robotics so that one human worker can do the work of four.”

Based on a patent application, the wearable system is envisioned as a 1.2-meter tall humanoid that may be covered with synthetic skin. It will include a head-mounted display and an exo-suit of sensors and actuators that carries out everyday tasks.

Essentially, it looks something like Spider-Man’s Doctor Octopus on the outside, but on the inside, Kindred utilizes quantum computation, a way of information processing and storage that is much faster and more powerful than that used by conventional computers. Data “learned” by the suit can be taught to other robots, allowing those robots to then perform the tasks autonomously.

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“It’s clear that the light is trapped — there are photons circulating around the atoms,” Everett says. “The atoms absorbed some of the trapped light, but a substantial proportion of the photons were frozen inside the atomic cloud.”

Co-researcher Geoff Campbell from ANU explained that while photons commonly pass by each other at the speed of light without any interactions, atoms interact with each other more freely.

“Corralling a crowd of photons in a cloud of ultra-cold atoms creates more opportunities for them to interact,” Campbell says.

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The race towards quantum computing is heating up. Faster, brighter, more exacting – these are all terms that could be applied as much to the actual science as to the research effort going on in labs around the globe.

Quantum technologies are poised to provide exponentially stronger computational power and secured communications. But the bar is high – advances are hard won and competition is intense.

At the forefront of the candidates to implement such technologies is the field of quantum photonics, particularly light sources that emit photons one at a time to be used as carriers of information.

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Remember that scene in “The Force Awakens” where the dark side warrior Kylo Ren stops a laser blast in mid-air? In a Canberra laboratory, physicists have managed a feat almost as magical: they froze the movement of light in a cloud of ultracold atoms. This discovery could help bring optical quantum computers from the realms of sci-fi to reality.

The experiment, published in a paper this week, was inspired by a computer stimulation run by lead researcher Jesse Everett from the Australian National University. The researchers used a vaporized cloud of ultracold rubidium atoms to create a light trap, into which they shone infrared lasers. The light trap constantly emitted and re-captured the light.

“It’s clear that the light is trapped – there are photons circulating around the atoms,” Everett says. “The atoms absorbed some of the trapped light, but a substantial proportion of the photons were frozen inside the atomic cloud.”

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In Brief.

Scientists at IBM achieve another breakthrough by recreation of artificial neurons that successfully respond to phase changes due to electric signals while using very little power, much like the human brain.

Even after all the developments in computers, the human brain remains by far, the most complex, sophisticated, and powerful computer in existence. And for decades, scientists have been looking for ways to translate its processing mechanisms into a system that machines can replicate.

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MIT researchers have designed nanosensors that can profile tumors and may yield insight into how they will respond to certain therapies. The system is based on levels of enzymes called proteases, which cancer cells use to remodel their surroundings.

Once adapted for humans, this type of sensor could be used to determine how aggressive a tumor is and help doctors choose the best treatment, says Sangeeta Bhatia, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Health Sciences and Technology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

“This approach is exciting because people are developing therapies that are protease-activated,” Bhatia says. “Ideally you’d like to be able to stratify patients based on their protease activity and identify which ones would be good candidates for these therapies.”

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