Although we’ll have to wait to discover what innovations Google’s secret “X lab” holds for the future, the company does have at least one bleeding-edge venture it wants to unveil to the public right now. In partnership with NASA, Google has embarked on a project to use a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer to tackle some of our biggest computational problems.
See also: 6 Obscure NASA Sites Every Nerd Has to See
And because visuals often help explain complex concepts, Google has posted a short documentary explaining what quantum computing is, and how it plans to use the technology to make new discoveries.
First announced back in May, Google’s partnership with NASA will allow the two teams — along with several universities — to share the powerful computer, so they can research several different areas.
With potential applications in fields such as weather analysis, physics, stock-market analysis and artificial intelligence, quantum computing gives researchers the power to put bits of data into their 0 and 1 states at the same time, rather than cycling through calculations in a linear fashion as is common with traditional computers.
This new computing dynamic gives scientists the ability to determine a variety of possible solutions simultaneously, saving energy and speeding up the computing process by many orders of magnitude.
For Google in particular, quantum computing could help it make advances in search, neural networking and artificial intelligence. These advances will ultimately help the company achieve its goal of being able to tell you what you want before you even ask it.
Of course, this very general description of quantum computing is still bit too much for some of us — still making our way through the tangle of traditional computing — to fully grasp. That’s why Google’s new video is a welcome primer on the topic, offering a set of very simple and entertaining explanations on the technology.
While the NASA partnership presents exciting possibilities for harnessing the new technology, Google has been looking at quantum computing for some time. As early as 2009, Google discussed its research work with quantum-computing company D-Wave, which was related to studying machine-learning with quantum algorithms.
At the time, Google’s Hartmut Neven wrote, “Over the past three years, a team at Google has studied how problems such as recognizing an object in an image or learning to make an optimal decision based on example data can be made amenable to solution by quantum algorithms … These algorithms promise to find higher-quality solutions for optimization problems than obtainable with classical solvers.”
The field of quantum computing is still so new that even researchers aren’t exactly sure of what they’ll learn over the next few years; it's what makes the project even more exciting.
Posting a message to Google+, the Google Quantum A.I. Lab team wrote, “We’re still in the early, early days, but we think quantum computing can help solve some of the world’s most challenging computer-science problems.
"We’re particularly interested in how quantum computing can advance machine learning, which can then be applied to virtually any field: from finding the cure for a disease to understanding changes in our climate.”
BONUS: 10 Great Behind-the-Scenes Glimpses of Google
This official Google vid offers a tour of Google HQ (a.k.a. the "Googleplex") in 200 seconds. Most interesting snippet of info? There are more than 200 dogs on campus on any given day. Woof!
Offering a behind-the-scenes glimpse into Google from an NBC news report's perspective, this clip was shot just after Google had been named America's best place to work by Fortune back in 2007.
Google's Zurich office is up there as one of the top premises in terms of wackiness. Here, Web User Magazine has a little nose around -- be sure to keep watching to the end for a quick look at the old fashioned library room.
The New York offices look just as sweet as Google's Silicon Valley headquarters. The building in the Big Apple has the second largest footprint of any NYC structure -- so big that the Googlers get round on scooters, leaving them in special scooter "parking bays." Watch out for the LEGO wall and really cool floor map.
There aren't a lot of revelations in this Aussie clip (the usual colorful offices, look at all the food and oooh, there's a ping pong table) but it goes some way to show that Google manages to keep its wacky office set up even 7,000 miles around the globe.
While it's hardly Google's most famous office, the Madison, Wisconsin location adds a good dose of the usual Google zaniness and manages to incorporate some of the building's history into its decor -- truly a unique workspace for all those lucky Googlers.
WGN News gets a tour of Google's premises in the windy city where we find out just how those "Recent Searches" displays in Google's lobbies remain so smut-free.
And -- as we didn't see this in the previous tour -- here's a look at the cool game room within the Chicago complex. It's like your dream lounge, but with more geeks.
An insider look at a Google office in Russia transcends any language barriers, although what's with all the soft toys?
Google isn't just about the colorful offices and crazy fun. It's also about the million or so servers that keep us Googling. Here Google opens the door to a data center in a somewhat dry video that will no doubt be fascinating to anyone in the industry!
Image: YouTube, Google