Cambridge Quantum Computing announced that they have used the structure of natural language to open up an entirely new realm of possible applications by translating grammatical sentences into quantum circuits, and then implementing the resulting programs on a quantum computer and actually performing question-answering.
This is the first time that natural language processing has been executed on a quantum computer. Furthermore, by achieving the results without relying on quantum RAM (random access memory device), CQC scientists have created a path to truly applicable quantum advantage within the era of Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum (NISQ), meaning fault tolerance.
By using CQC’s platform-agnostic retargetable compiler (a compiler that has been designed to be easier to modify to generate code), the programs were successfully executed on an IBM quantum computer, achieving “meaning-aware” and “grammatically informed” natural language processing – a dream of computer scientists since the earliest days of the computer age.
CQC is expected to provide further details in the near future including ways to scale the programs so that meaningfully large numbers of sentences can be used on NISQ machines as they themselves scale in quantum volume and using other types of quantum computers.