00:09Welcome to the Digital Innovation Channel, this is a series of conversations with major scientists
00:15who are all participating in the World Tech Conference in June in Milan. We are starting
00:22with Professor Hidetoshi Nishimori. Professor Hidetoshi Nishimori is a theoretical physicist
00:27at the Institute of Science in Tokyo's Specialized Academy for Quantum Computing. His groundbreaking
00:34theory on spin glasses and quantum annealing was first published in 1988 and is one of the
00:41contributions to today's quantum computing revolution. For his work, he was awarded several
00:46prizes, such as the NEC CNC Prize, the MEXT Commendation for Science and Technology, and the
00:53Nishina Memorial Prize. We have a great pleasure of having Professor Nishimori in contact with
00:58us from Tokyo. Thank you for accepting this interview, Professor Nishimori. Let's start
01:04by a simple explanation for the layman of quantum annealing.
01:12Yes, it's a challenge. Well, imagine that you want to find the shortest path of the delivery
01:26route for a truck driver going over various positions among, for instance, millions of possibilities. And it's a very
01:36difficult task, typically called combinatorial optimization. And quantum annealing is designed to
01:46to solve such problems. And such problem combinatorial optimization is known to be mapped to the so-called energy
01:59landscape program, in which there are many hills and valleys. And the problem is to find the lowest point in
02:09the valley, which
02:10corresponds to the solution to the delivery routing problem. And conventional classical methods start from a random
02:22guess as the initial state and search the next possibilities one by one, step by step. And quantum annealing instead
02:36uses
02:37quantum superposition and quantum annealing in the sense that one spreads possibilities of all valleys at once, initially, and tries
02:53to find better
02:54solutions by going through the barrier, not going over the barrier using quantum tunneling effects. So such an approach is
03:03believed to be more
03:05efficient than conventional classical methods in many cases. That's what quantum annealing is.
03:12Thank you. Thank you very much. That's very clear. Are we very close? Or how far do we need to
03:18get to quantum computing using quantum
03:21annealing to become, to become functional, totally 100% functional?
03:28Well, the hardware developed by a Canadian startup called D-Wave is already on the market and used in some
03:39cases in real
03:41applications to solve real world problems. But that pace is very still limited. So we are trying very hard to
03:55see what
03:56problems are most suitable for quantum annealing and what problems are not. This is an effort, not just in theory,
04:07but in hardware, the application, in the software development. So it is already successful already to some extent,
04:14but not to the level that we should expect theoretically maximally.
04:21So it's ongoing work. And what is your vision of the future of your area of research? How could it
04:31be influenced
04:32already by the progress that you've already achieved, the results that you've already achieved?
04:38So as a serious scholar, it is very hard to predict the future. We talk about facts, not guesses usually.
04:48So in the best possible scenario, in several years or at most in 10 years, quantum annealing will find
05:03very many applications in the real world due to the developments in theory, in the hardware,
05:11in the software, in all developments, if we can overcome various difficulties in various levels.
05:20But in the worst case, we may end up in some limited utility that already exists. So the conclusion is,
05:31it is very hard to tell, but we can expect a lot at this present time.
05:38Thank you. Thank you very much. So, and as you said, the new technologies also influence your area of research.
05:44So there is a sort of two ways interaction between the development of theory on one side
05:49and the development of technologies on the other side. Can you expand a little bit on this?
05:56Yes. This field of quantum annealing, or more generally quantum computing, is very peculiar
06:04among all fields of science and technology in the sense that basic theory and the hardware realization
06:14and its application to real world problems are going all simultaneously.
06:23And for instance, the real hardware doesn't work very ideally. It has noise or many other imperfections.
06:33And the data from such real hardware inspires us to develop a new theory because it gives some strong hint
06:45about the behavior of quantum mechanical microscopic objects under the influence of noise, which we didn't expect.
06:53So the data from the hardware is a sort of treasure trope for theorists. And at the same time,
07:05theory developments strongly stimulate the scope of the hardware, the real applications. So it's a very
07:16stimulating field, one to the other and the other way around. And everything is going on simultaneously.
07:24And that's quite a new situation in research, right?
07:27Yes, yes, yes.
07:29Yeah, that's incredible. So you accepted to take part in the World Tech Conference in June in Italy.
07:36You are among many illustrious scientists who have accepted to speak at this conference.
07:41And you know that this is not a standard conference just for researchers. There are
07:45many representatives of other quite distant worlds like finance, government, politics.
07:50Do you think it's important today to organize such gatherings for many stakeholders simultaneously?
07:59Yes, of course. As I said, this technology, quantum mining, is still in some sense an infancy.
08:09So we don't know for sure, by theory, which applications are best suited for quantum mining.
08:20We know we have some evidence by some experts, but we want to know what applications are best suited for
08:29quantum mining.
08:30And it is very useful to learn from the end users, the end people from the industry, finance, and so
08:40on.
08:41And on the other hand, people from those fields out of the academia will learn what can be done
08:49and what cannot be done from theorists and hardware developers. And it is very important and useful to have mutual
08:58interactions from these very different fields.
09:02And World Tech Conference will be a very important occasion for that matter.
09:07Thank you very much, Professor Nishimori, for this enlightening conversation and see you in June in Italy.
09:16Yes, yes. I visited Milan several months ago and I'm going there again. I'm excited to go there.
09:24Thank you. Thank you very much.
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