DARPA Announces ‘Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum Devices’ Program

(Sociable.co) The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is looking to fund research into quantum computing without having a fully-operational quantum computer. On February 27, 2019 DARPA announced its Optimization with Noisy Intermediate-Scale Quantum devices (ONISQ) program.
DARPA is looking to take advantage of one concept in particular that didn’t even exist two years ago. It is called NISQ, and it was coined during a keynote address by John Preskill, Richard P. Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics at Caltech. “We are now entering a pivotal new era in quantum technology, wrote Preskill, adding, “for this talk, I needed a name to describe this impending new era, so I made up a word: NISQ. This stands for Noisy Intermediate Scale Quantum. We shouldn’t expect NISQ to change the world by itself; instead it should be regarded as a step toward more powerful quantum technologies we’ll develop in the future.”