An entirely new type of computer that blends optical and electrical processing could get around this impending processing constraint and solve superlarge optimization problems. If it can be scaled up, this non-traditional computer could save costs by finding more optimal solutions to problems that have an incredibly high number of possible solutions.
There is a special type of problem – called a combinatorial optimization problem – that traditional computers find difficult to solve, even approximately. An example is what’s known as the “traveling salesman” problem, wherein a salesman has to visit a specific set of cities, each only once, and return to the first city, and the salesman wants to take the most efficient route possible. This problem may seem simple but the number of possible routes increases extremely rapidly as cities are added, and this underlies why the problem is difficult to solve.
An Ising machine based on lasers
The Stanford team has built what’s called an Ising machine, named for a mathematical model of magnetism. The machine acts like a reprogrammable network of artificial magnets where each magnet only points up or down and, like a real magnetic system, it is expected to tend toward operating at low energy.
The theory is that, if the connections among a network of magnets can be programmed to represent the problem at hand, once they settle on the optimal, low-energy directions they should face, the solution can be derived from their final state. In the case of the traveling salesman, each artificial magnet in the Ising machine represents the position of a city in a particular path.
Rather than using magnets on a grid, the Stanford team used a special kind of laser system, known as a degenerate optical parametric oscillator, that, when turned on, will represent an upward- or downward-pointing “spin.” Pulses of the laser represent a city’s position in a path the salesman could take. In an earlier version of this machine, the team members extracted a small portion of each pulse, delayed it and added a controlled amount of that portion to the subsequent pulses. In traveling salesman terms, this is how they program the machine with the connections and distances between the cities. The pulse-to-pulse couplings constitute the programming of the problem. Then the machine is turned on to try to find a solution, which can be obtained by measuring the final output phases of the pulses.
The problem in this previous approach was connecting large numbers of pulses in arbitrarily complex ways. It was doable but required an added controllable optical delay for each pulse, which was costly and difficult to implement.
Science – A fully-programmable 100-spin coherent Ising machine with all-to-all connections
Science – A quantum annealing architecture with all-to-all connectivity from local interactions
Abstract
Unconventional, special-purpose machines may aid in accelerating the solution of some of the hardest problems in computing, such as large-scale combinatorial optimizations, by exploiting different operating mechanisms than standard digital computers. We present a scalable optical processor with electronic feedback that can be realized at large scale with room-temperature technology. Our prototype machine is able to find exact solutions of, or to sample good approximate solutions to, a variety of hard instances of Ising problems with up to 100 spins and 10,000 spin-spin connections.
Scaling up
The latest Stanford Ising machine shows that a drastically more affordable and practical version could be made by replacing the controllable optical delays with a digital electronic circuit. The circuit emulates the optical connections among the pulses in order to program the problem and the laser system still solves it.
Nearly all of the materials used to make this machine are off-the-shelf elements that are already used for telecommunications. That, in combination with the simplicity of the programming, makes it easy to scale up. Stanford’s machine is currently able to solve 100-variable problems with any arbitrary set of connections between variables, and it has been tested on thousands of scenarios.
A group at NTT in Japan that consulted with Stanford’s team has also created an independent version of the machine; its study has been published alongside Stanford’s by Science. For now, the Ising machine still falls short of beating the processing power of traditional digital computers when it comes to combinatorial optimization. But it is gaining ground fast and the researchers are looking forward to seeing what other work will be possible based on this breakthrough.
“I think it’s an exciting avenue of exploration for finding alternative computers. It can get us closer to more efficient ways of tackling some of the most daunting computational problems we have,” said Marandi. “So far, we’ve made a laser-based computer that can target some of these problems, and we have already shown some promising results.”
SOURCES- Science, Stanford University
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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