Fujitsu Used ‘Digital Annealer’ to Assess & Redesign Car Manufacturer’s Painting Process

(Silicon.co.uk) Johan Carsten, Fujitsu’s UK CTO, recently discussed the firm’s current push into quantum-ish computing, the impact of AI on future workforces, the logistics of self-driving vehicles, how 5G will change everything, and how whichever nation wins the supercomputer/data analytics arms race will ultimately rule the world.
Fujitsu has developed a quantum-like chip. Fujitsu used to have the largest and fastest supercomputer in the world, but was overtaken by a competitor and is now obviously tying to get back into the market space.
The ‘Digital Annealer’ is a way of for Fujitsu to get back into the space. The Digital Annealer is not quantum–it’s ‘quantum like’, but it gives you the results that are 1 million times faster than any processor on the market at the moment.
Fujitsu has already used the “Digital Annealer’ in finance and manufacturing. For example, there is a global car manufacturer that can paint a thousand cars a day. That’s the maximum capacity of this line. So in order for them to produce more vehicles, they need to build another line – and it’s a billion dollars to do that. Fujitsu took how the robots spray and asked if they can work together better in this environment. They put that finding though through the Annealer formulas, and two or three seconds later the result said, “if you do this, you will get 30% more capacity”. A traditional computer would take weeks and weeks and weeks to try to calculate this – and it won’t be exact.