How Quantum Computers Can Help Machine Learning

Machine learning is about getting computers to do useful things without explicit programming. A computer can learn from photos labelled cat or dog, then quickly new pictures into the correct species. Other algoritms find subtle patterns that help doctors diagnose cancers on medical scans. In two thousand 13, two studies showed how quantum computers could speed up some unsupervised learning tasks where the algorithm must discover patterns on its own. The approach was promising, but theoretical and impossible to carry out with attack of the time.