Journalists invited for a tour in new NASA Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

NASA sent out invitations on November 20 to journalists for a tour to its new Quantum Artificial Intelligence Laboratory set on December 8 at NASA Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley.

According to Venture Beat, the new laboratory is a joint project of the space agency, Google, along with the Universities Space Research Association. For the first time the media will have a glimpse of the quantum computing hardware and take photographs of it.

SpaceRef reported that the laboratory is built to explore possibilities for quantum computers to take on optimization problems that are almost impossible for the normal computers to process. Researchers assigned in the new laboratory are using the technology to investigate how quantum algorithms can radically enhance the agency's capabilities to solve hard optimization problems related to aeronautics, Earth science, and space exploration.

According to a report by iTechpost, Hartmut Neven, the director of engineering from Google, said the Quantum AI team will base their operations on the D-Wave quantum system. The laboratory uses the 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum compute, which is placed at the NASA Ames campus.

The quantum computing system uses quantum bits or qubits, which has a value of zero or one, or both. This means it can perform faster computations unlike the classical computers that uses bits, which only has the value of either zero or one. The quantum computing system can compute great number that will be used simultaneously. This makes it ideal for certain kinds of processes.

The invitation reads "Researchers on NASA's QuAIL team are using the system to investigate areas where quantum algorithms might someday dramatically improve the agency's ability to solve difficult optimization problems in aeronautics, Earth and space sciences, and space exploration."

Google and NASA first told the public about their efforts on quantum computing in May 2013. It was originally around the startup D-Wave Systems, but Google planned to expand the operations by building its own quantum chips.