Quantum computers hold promise for artificial intelligence research

Nature : On paper at least, quantum computers can solve decryption, factoring, and certain other number-crunching mathematical problems faster than their classical counterparts can. Now MIT’s Seth Lloyd and his collaborators have opened up another area in which quantum computers could prove helpful: artificial intelligence. In Lloyd’s proposal, the quantum methods could be used to break up problems into smaller chunks that are then used by the computer to guide it toward the solution. Such machine-learning approaches underlie artificial intelligence and could find any number of uses, including image recognition for comparing photos and simultaneous localization and mapping for autonomous vehicles.