Explainer: What is Quantum Machine Learning and How Can it Help Us?

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Take . Humans excel at this task, but it’s proved difficult to simulate artificially. Training a machine to recognize a cat doesn’t mean inputting a set definition of what a cat looks like. Instead, many different images of cats are inputted; the aim is that the computer learns to distill the underlying “cat-like” pattern of pixels.

This dependence on data is a powerful training tool. But it comes with potential pitfalls. If machines are trained to find and exploit patterns in data then, in certain instances , they only perpetuate the race, gender or class prejudices specific to current human intelligence.

But the data-processing facility inherent to also has the potential to generate applications that can improve human lives. “Intelligent” machines could help scientists to more efficiently detect cancer or better understand mental health .

Most of the progress in so far has been classical: the techniques that machines use to learn to follow the laws of classical physics. The data they learn from has a classical form. The machines on which the algorithms run are also classical.

We work in the emerging field of quantum , which is exploring whether the branch of physics called quantum mechanics might improve . Quantum mechanics is different from classical physics on a fundamental level: it deals in probabilities and makes a principle out of uncertainty. Quantum mechanics also expands physics to include interesting phenomena which cannot be explained using classical intuition.

Quantum mechanics is a branch of physics that attempts to understand and apply mathematical, verifiable rules to the behavior of nature at the smallest end of the spectrum – on the scale of atoms, electrons, and photons. It was first developed at the beginning of the 20th century and has been very successful in describing systems on the microscopic level.

The fundamental divide between the quantum and classical worlds has been popularised by the Schrodinger’s cat thought experiment. In it, a cat is sealed in a box along with a vial of poison and a radioactive atom. The release of the poison – and the cat’s life – depends on the decay of the atom.

Quantum mechanics allows the atom to be described as simultaneously decayed or undecayed until a measurement forces it into an exact state. But it then should follow that the cat can be described as both dead and alive at the same time until the box is opened and the state of the cat made certain. The paradox illustrates the difficulty of applying quantum rules to classical objects.[…]