Machine Learning Meets Quantum Computing & Processes Simple Images

(TechnologyReview) Francesco Tacchino and colleagues at the University of Pavia in Italy have built the world’s first perceptron implemented on a quantum computer and then put it through its paces on some simple image processing tasks. NOTE: A perceptron is a single-layer neural network created by Frank Rosenblatt at the Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory.and the New York Times reported that it was “the embryo of an electronic computer that [the Navy] expects will be able to walk, talk, see, write, reproduce itself, and be conscious of its existence.”
Tacchino and his team have repeated Rosenblatt’s early work on a quantum computer. The technology that makes this possible is IBM’s Q-5 “Tenerife” superconducting quantum processor. It turns out that the quantum perceptron can easily classify the patterns in simple images. “We show that this quantum model of a perceptron can be used as an elementary nonlinear classifier of simple patterns,” say Tacchino.