The worlds most secure codes in minutes, design extraordinary new medicines, even pave the way for intelligent machines. Big Tech Companies like google, ibm and microsoft are all trying to be the first to achieve a breakthrough in the field of quantum computing. But we are not quite there yet. At the moment, if you want a quantum computer, you need all of this. You need your ionising lasers, your cooling lasers, and your processor. You need all of this, and currently all this can do is add a zero and a one. But it does do it in a really cool way. Quantum computers harness weird and wonderful phenomena seen only at very small scales. The data in an ordinary computer is represented as bits, each of which can either be zero or one. A quantum computer, instead, uses quantum bits, or qubits. Now, these qubits can be both zero and one at the same time. This is called superposition, and it is a key feature of a Quantum Computers unique powers. So, when a quantum computer adds zero and one, it is also adding one and zero, and one and one, and zero and zero, all at the same time. So number crunching could, in theory, be done much faster on a quantum computer. There are a few really important things that we know they will be to do, if we can ever build them. So one thing is searching through a data base. So lets say you have a list of a million items, say, and you want to find a particular item on that list. Well, all an ordinary computer can do is look through that list one at a time, the first item, the second item, and the third item, until eventually you find the item that youre looking for. A quantum computer can in some sense look at all of those items simultaneously. We know that Quantum Computers will be able to help Artificial Intelligence learn better, and learn faster. Optimising things in designing things if youre trying to design, lets say, the shape of a car so that air will flow over it in exactly the right way, that is an optimisation problem. It looks like Quantum Computers are going to be extremely good at that. And then there is code breaking. If you give an ordinary computer a code to break, it will try every possible combination, one at a time. But give a quantum computer a code to break, and it can try all the codes at once. This is a huge area of application of Quantum Computers and its financially the driving force of putting money in the industry and persuading people to build the things. The first government which has a functioning quantum computer which can break secret messages is going to be at a big advantage and maybe will want to try and hide away the fact that theyve got those capabilities. And, if superposition wasnt weird enough, a Quantum Computers qubits can be paired up, or entangled, and then can instantaneously affect each other from anywhere else in the universe. Well, thats all very well in theory, but it is really hard in practice. At sussex university, researchers are preparing for the challenge of scaling up their prototype Quantum Computers, to take them from handfuls of qubits on the lab bench to an industrial scale. So what you see here is an actual working quantum computer. As we are filming this, you can literally see an atom, for example, being in one state and another state simultaneously. And what you see on this screen is the evidence that that really occurs. That really is the atom in very strange and counter intuitive state. So Quantum Computers have been on the way for a long time, the holy grail of science, and with that, it actually seemed nearly impossible to build them. So people felt maybe its just never possible to build such a machine. The reason why its so hard is because, to control quantum effects in such a way, allowing us to build a large scale quantum computer, is tremendously hard. Quantum effects like if an atom can be an two different places at the same time, or entanglement, which einstein referred to as spooky, is so hard to control. At the moment, these prototypes offer a glimpse of how these computers might work in the future. How will we use them when we have them . What does a quantum Computer Programme looked like . What does a quantum Computer Programme look like . The basic Building Blocks of a quantum Computer Programme are really very alien to us. Theyre things like superposition and entanglement. Those are the right high level concepts to put into our quantum Computer Programmes, but its very hard for the human brain to understand what entanglement is, and what its consequences are. Thinking of qubits connected by pieces of string actually works extremely well, to help us design and predict Quantum Programmes, and predict what theyll do. So perhaps a high level Quantum Programme manager of the future could look like a knot, or could look like childrens game of untangling fishing lines and seeing who has which fish. You imagine going up and down, and coiled around, and the pattern of how those strings interact has a bearing on your Quantum Programme. I do feel the programmers have a little bit of time to sort their software out, though, because the hardware is also still a work in progress. Ive gone underground to see Oxford Universitys quantum computer. The lab is a wizards paradise of lasers, vacuum chambers, and traps for atom sized particles. Its an ion trap. In the lab, they have achieved a world record level of control over their quantum bits. They can even show off by making a single qubit glow in morse code. Click. What will your quantum computer look like . It wont be this size . So ideally, it looks incredibly boring and incredibly small. So take an optic cable, two metres by one metre high. We think we can get this down to something the size of a shoebox in the next five years. Once you have everything in the right place. Once we have everything the right place, machined down, optimised and rather than made by physicists, made by engineers. Rather having knobs, when you have enough people twisting them. Youre not looking to put more and more qubits into the same box, are you . What we want to do is build some devices which contain five or ten qubits, but build many of these devices. So its the same as if you have a supercomputer. Nowadays, you dont have one big computer. You have lots of small computers, and data centres humming with lots of different machines. Thats what we envisage these things are. It does seem like it is not the most efficient design, if youre plugging lots of these things together with optic fibre, rather than making a quantum computer that has 50 qubits in one place. Yes, the most efficient device we could ever build would have all the qubits being able to talk to every other qubit. Thats ideally the place where you want to be. But you always get to the point where you cant put any more qubits in the device. At that point, we want to have a network we can build up. So, once youve got as big as you can with these techniques, you can then network them together to build bigger networks. The huge potential of quantum computing has attracted big tech players. Google told us it will have Something Big to announce in march 2018. Ibm has a 20 qubit quantum computer that researchers can programme over the internet. Both these companies are trying to build reliable Quantum Computers of around 50 qubits. Now, at this point, they will achieve something called quantum supremacy, which sounds world changing, but it might not be. Why i dont like the phrase is that, when you cross that boundary, nothing instantaneously magical happens. Its just the point at which you cant predict what the machine would do. Its the point that the machine might be useful for something. But to be honest, we havent worked out anything that, say, a 60 qubit quantum computer could usefully do. So its into the uncharted territory, very exciting, but its not at the point where the quantum hardware is supreme. You should not throw away your phone or your laptop or your desktop and have a quantum computer instead. So, with more Tech Companies getting serious about quantum computing, there is now a place for them to show off their ideas. It is the Quantum Technologies fair, in london, and kat has been along to see what is on the quantum horizon. When it comes to quantum computing, a lot of the research seems to be happening in academia. But i wanted to find out how much of it is being taken away from the lab bench, for applications in the real world. Every stall at this fair is using the same tech used in quantum computing the principles of trapping, manipulating and measuring tiny, atom sized particles. But the Practical Applications here are creative, and potentially life changing, from diamonds used in Heart Disease sensing, to capturing individual virus particles. Theyre really designed to be able to measure very, very sensitively, at very small lengths. So its idealfor things like nanoparticles, like viruses, and indeed, for measuring chemical signatures, as well. Use the mouse to move that scale back and forth, it should be fairly obvious, when it flashes really bright. There you go, thats it. When it wiggles around, thats when youve got a particle trapped in your resonator. The ultimate aim is that viruses could be picked up using this diagnostic tool. But the main focus now, for most people here, is on overcoming the engineering challenge of making large, bulky systems a lot, lot smaller. Heavy industry, all the way through to defence and security, transport, and air technologies. It is incredible to see how many stalls here are researching so many different areas when it comes to Quantum Technology. And theyre all working together, with an open source mentality, along with a lot of investment. The British Government spent £270 million over the last five years on Quantum Technology research. The collaborative element, especially the number of things that npl is involved in, because we have a lot of the Core Technology and science, and were just looking at what are the actual applications in the uk business world. From afar, a lot of the applications here still look like complex machinery, but anne curtis has been looking at its potential in an important area, far, far away. So one of the main applications we can use the Quantum Technologies for is quantum sensors. And what were doing in this experiment is we want to sense greenhouse gases, and measure how much there is, how that is changing over time. And one good way to monitor large scale systems is from space. To put something properly on a satellite, it has to go through all the space qualifying tests, so every item in there would have to be space qualifying. Most of the Fibre Technology isnt so good in space, due to radiation effects. But theres no reason why this couldnt be miniaturised and put up into space. Its just the next stage of funding. It is so hard to be here today and not feel excited about Quantum Technologies, but one thing everybody has said to me is that their particular real world applications are a few years in the future still. So, when it comes to quantum computing, it is still very much a case of watch this space. Hello, and welcome to the week in tech. It was the week that the federal Communications Commission in america voted to repeal rules on net neutrality, which had stopped Internet Service providers from offering different speeds and priorities for traffic online. The extraordinarily elongated asteroid called oumuamua was being checked for signs of alien technology. And, here on earth, the faces of 2 billion people can be compared in a matter of seconds with a minority report style system, dragonfly eye, unveiled in china. It was also the week that netflix was caught up in a creepy viewing controversy after revealing on twitter that 53 subscribers watched the holiday film a christmas prince every day for 18 days in a row. Netflix defended the tweet, saying it represented overall trends, and not specific individuals. The city of San Francisco has banned the use of delivery robots on most of its sidewalks, stating not all innovation is all that great for society. Meanwhile, dutch police say it may not have been such a good idea to use eagles to catch drones after all. Who could have guessed . Seen here on click, the birds were trained to snatch the machines from the sky. But the cost of keeping them was too high, and they didnt always do what they were told. And finally, if youre missing harry potter, dont despair. Artificial intelligence may have a solution for you. A new chapter has been created for a book called harry potter and what looked like a portrait of a large pile of ash. Its plot twists include harry dipping hermione in hot sauce, and ron turning into spiders and trying to eat hermiones family. Wizard. Earlier in the year we looked at some of the 360 cameras which have taken off in 2017. Dan filmed with the new kid on the block, the insta one in berlin. And he came back very pleased with it. Easy to use, lots of features, including this bullet time mode, a bit like the film the matrix, where you can get a picture of yourself from all angles. But what have the more established names in photography got to offer us . Well, with christmas just around the corner, this time we sent dan to a suitably festive place to put two pro sumer 360 cameras through their paces. The ancient city of bath hosts a very traditional christmas market, one that i want to catch in the round. Ive got two cameras for the job. One is from kodak, the other is nikons. They look pretty similar, with two ultra wide angle lenses capturing everything, before the two images are stitched together in camera. But look closer, and you will see the kodak sporting two different lenses, one smaller than the other, superwide 235 degree lens. It also has the tiniest Remote Control in the world, and a slightly higher price tag than the nikon. Our producer has the kodak, while im putting the nikon through its paces. Now, we dontjust want to test these cameras out in the daylight, when all the conditions are absolutely perfect. For these cameras, we want to test them out to see what theyre like as it starts to get dark. Will the bright lights be a problem, and will we see all of the detail . Time to go for a wander and see whose 360 is best. Please dive in, ladies. Dont let me get in your way. And, in no time at all, i found the festive liquor stand. Not just wine, but flavoured vodka here, and the nikon is not put off by those flashing lights. But the image is a little dark, so we will brighten it for you in postproduction. There you go, and now you can see the other problem. The image stitching means ive almost lost my head, before touching a drop. The kodaks image is brighter than the nikon, but we found that the quality from that super wide angle lens was softer than the smaller lens on the other side of the device. Of course, youre best off with a stick attached to both of these cameras, otherwise your hands get sort of in the way. Now, to make the test fairer, we decided to see how these cameras fared back to back. Or front to front. Or back to front. Well, its difficult to tell, to be honest. We shot them side by side. Look at this. We found a 360 globe for a 360 camera. And its the nikon showing off more natural colours, benefiting from a more accurate light balance, although some might prefer the warmer kodak results, because it is very christmassy. At the chilled cider shop, the kodak warmed things up, while nikon kept things more natural and crisp. Both cameras struggled to stitch their shots together perfectly. This is the raw footage, with no touching up, and the nikon has done a reasonablejob. The stitching point is more visible on the kodak, partly because of the different qualities of those two lenses. On the upside, its kodak that offers the ability to play with how the images are stitched together in its free software, something the nikons more basic offering lacks. For sheerfun, the kodak also offers greater flexibility when playing back what you shot. This is Little Planet mode. And, if you want to do it on the nikon, then youll need some third party 360 software, which may mean additional cost. Finally, the thing everybody forgets when they use a camera sound. It is very odd being filmed by two cameras. Were being filmed as well, it is 360. Oh, goodness me. You can tell shes had too much cider, because hers moves around a bit. Im just cold we reckon both do a greatjob, but the nikon is slightly clearer, although the kodak offers the possibility of attaching an external mic. So which camera will enthusiasts be hoping santa brings them this year . We think the kodak edges it for easier post production, while the nikon has a better shot. But, if youre hoping for a trouble free, cinematic, seamless result for under £1100, you may have to wait until Something Else takes off. At least for now. This is acute art, a Virtual Reality arts platform, and a gallery without walls. And its about to launch, with vr works by some of the worlds leading contemporary artists. Amongst these works is one by marina abramovic, the self confessed grandmother of performance art, who pushes her own body to the limits to challenge and move people. Ok, well, theres marina, in a tank of water. Well, she seems to want to talk to me, but the water is rising up her body. Immersive player, in real life, where someone rescues another person, or offers aid of any kind, there is a transfer of energy. Approach the water. I think she wants me to touch the glass. Make contact. 0h. Oh, ok, right. Now im somewhere very cold, and everything seems to be going wrong. As always, with vr, you really get a sense of scale. I mean, that ice shelf looks absolutely enormous, and its crashing down right in front of me. This work is an expression of marinas fear that humans will not survive the consequences of climate change, if we dont change our behaviour. Im being covered in spray. And now theres a note. I will walk instead of drive. I will reuse what i can. I will reduce the waste i create. Marina wants to leave the participants with a feeling that they should do something good for the planet. We have to save this planet that we are living on, because what im interested in is to create a literal contract with the planet earth, and give my word of honour that i will do something to save it. Screaming. You are pretty well known for pushing your body further than most people would want to push their bodies. Here, you appear virtually in a tank of water, but i get the sense that you still did some pretty real stuff, to make it seem as real as possible . You know, actually, to do this, i have to really be in the water. And then we have to really be in a swimming pool, with two divers holding my legs, so i can really go in and see can feel like i would actually die, if i didnt have any more air to breathe. So its funny that you have to do something which is virtual, but you still have to do it physically. Before, youve said that you dont think your performances can be captured adequately with photos or videos, because you need to be there, you need the experiences, it is about actually physically being there. And i wonder if Virtual Reality is close enough to being there, that is why you chose it . Because its almost being there, isnt it . It is very important, the Energy Dialogue between the audience and the performer. And the only thing that can catch it, before it was video with sound and movement. Virtual reality is really another step further, because you can go around the objects, you can interact, you can do this. But still, i think its so much a question of how much energy and charisma actually can transfer from the real performance into the virtual body. The rather mesmerising marina abramovic. We will hear more from marina in next weeks programme, which is the christmas show, so expect tons of sensible journalism and no fun whatsoever. Maybe. In the meantime, you can follow us on facebook and on twitter, where we live at bbcclick. Thanks for watching, and we will see you next week for christmas. Good morning. After our wintry week of weather, its all change on the weather front. The week ahead looks mild for all of us. Theres also going to be a lot of dry weather in the story. But, unfortunately, not that much in the way of sunshine. Itll be quite cloudy. And we can see the first signs of that cloud spilling in from the atlantic through the night. Now, ahead of it, well keep some clear skies. So, a west east divide first thing in the morning. Eastern areas could start cold, even frosty as well. But you will see brightness. Patchy fog as well in the midlands and south east england. Thatll be slow to clear. Here, temperatures hovering around just below freezing. Further west, its a different story. The milder air pushing in and turning wet and windy. In fact, some of that rain as it pushes into the Higher Grounds of scotland will be heavy for a time. The rain pushes into South West Wales and South West England through the morning. The frost will lift. Dry weather clouding over. By the middle of the afternoon, the rain does south east. That will give us quite a contrast into the afternoon. Showery outbreaks of rain linger into the south west. Poor visibility with any height in the Higher Grounds of wales. A similar story in the pennines. The south east, a wet end to the afternoon. The mild air behind it, 10 degrees in wales. And for Northern Ireland and scotland, not too bad. A real contrast to the morning. Sunshine coming through, just a few isolated showers in the far north. But nowhere near as cold as it has been. Rain continuing to sweep south overnight. Briefly, the wind could swing around to a north westerly for a time. And that means a slightly chilly start to monday morning in places. Temperatures falling as low as six degrees. It also means we could have brightness to start with in eastern areas. But this is the trend for the early half of the week. High pressure building from the south and it is likely to stay there. Weather fronts fringing the extreme north west. The winds will revert to a south westerly. A mild start to next week. A change to the feel of the weather if you have outdoor plan in the next few days. Christmas holidays coming. Cloud coming and double digits for all. Whatever you do, enjoy it. Goodbye. This is bbc news. Im Lewis Vaughan jones. Our top stories celebrities under threat. New evacuation orders in california as the flames spread towards the homes of the rich and famous. The Un Security Council considers a resolution which would challenge president trumps recognition ofjerusalem as israels capital. The family of the canadian billionaire couple found dead in their home criticise the media and the police over speculation about the cause of their deaths. Rescuers in southern chile are searching for survivors after a deadly mudslide engulfed a village. And hitting new heights. The worlds steepest funicular railways opens in switzerland
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