This chip sits at the heart of the D-Wave Two, a shed-sized computer housed in the Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California. Made from layers of niobium instead of silicon, the chip can have "a footprint in two different realities -- it has two allowed states", says D-Wave cofounder Geordie Rose. "Think of them as 0 and 1, but during its operation it can be tuned to be in a quantum mechanical 'superposition' of those states" -- meaning it can consider two things at once, allowing programs to mimic human learning.
Nasa, Google and the Universities Space Research Association are sharing it to improve their machine-learning initiatives. "Software in the future is going to be written with these techniques," says Rose. "Speech recognition and synthesis, sentiment analysis, extracting patterns in genomic data for drug discovery -- there's a long list of things that humans currently do better than machines, that these new types of approaches are starting to gain inroads into, and will ultimately overtake human capability."