Quantum Machine Will Study All Possible Futures Simultaneously

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – Wouldn’t it be nice if you could examine all future outcomes when you make a decision? Perhaps one day, you will be able to press a button on a quantum computer and see all future timelines. We’re not there yet, but it doesn’t mean this cannot be achieved sooner than we think.

It sounds like a science-fiction idea, but researchers are attempting to build a complex quantum machine that will study all possible futures.

If you have watched the movie Avengers: Infinity War you may remember Dr. Strange looked into the future 14,000,605 times in order to find every possible scenario. He had to examine millions of possible futures to search for a single timeline in which the heroes would be victorious. It’s a pity Dr. Strange didn’t have access to a quantum computer because investigating all those future timelines would have been much easier.

Now that’s exactly something scientists are working on. A team of researchers from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) and Griffith University in Australia have constructed a prototype quantum device that can generate all possible futures in a simultaneous quantum superposition.

As explained earlier, the superposition phenomenon in quantum physics allows an atom to be simultaneously ‘here’ and ‘there’. It may sound odd, but in quantum physics most things are quite bizarre.

How Can You Build A Quantum Machine That Examines Possible Futures?

“When we think about the future, we are confronted by a vast array of possibilities,” Assistant Professor Mile Gu of NTU Singapore, who led development of the quantum algorithm that underpins the prototype said.

“These possibilities grow exponentially as we go deeper into the future. For instance, even if we have only two possibilities to choose from each minute, in less than half an hour there are 14 million possible futures.

In less than a day, the number exceeds the number of atoms in the universe.”

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What he and his research group realized, however, was that a quantum computer can examine all possible futures by placing them in a quantum superposition – similar to Schrödinger’s famous cat, which is simultaneously alive and dead.

The research team implemented a specially devised photonic quantum information processor in which the potential future outcomes of a decision process are represented by the locations of photons – quantum particles of light.

They then demonstrated that the state of the quantum device was a superposition of multiple potential futures, weighted by their probability of occurrence.

“When Feynman started studying quantum physics, he realized that when a particle travels from point A to point B, it does not necessarily follow a single path. Instead, it simultaneously transverses all possible paths connecting the points.

Credit: futuretimeline.net

Our work extends this phenomenon and harnesses it for modelling statistical futures,” Dr. Jayne Thompson, a member of the Singapore team explained.

While currently limited to only 16 simultaneous futures, the team says that the device can in principle scale without bounds.

“Many current artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms learn by seeing how small changes in their behavior can lead to different future outcomes, so our techniques may enable quantum enhanced AIs to learn the effect of their actions much more efficiently,” co-author Farzad Ghafari from Griffith University said.

The true potential of the breakthrough still remains to be seen, because as the science tells us, the future is a vast range of possibilities.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff Writer