The SpinQ Gemini Mini Quantum Computer
Experience the future firsthand in a former head shop
Quantum computers, which are thousands of times more powerful than anything currently available, are as different from conventional computers as a MacBook is from an abacus.
A computational device that works on the principle that a particle of matter can be in two places at once—thousands or even billions of miles from each other—yet still act as one may sound like something from science fiction, or indeed from esoteric philosophy.
Yet it’s not only undisputed, validated science, but its practical application, quantum computing, is well beyond the experimental phase. Haim Israel, Bank of America’s global strategist, recently declared it to be “a revolution bigger than fire.”
There’s a handful of working quantum computers across the world, each costing tens of millions of dollars, and corporations pay big money to rent time on them.
Your columnist has seen three such machines, in the Netherlands, London, and Portland, Oregon. With refrigeration equipment that looks like tall, golden chandeliers, and new and unfamiliar electronic components such as “spin qubits,” you could easily imagine them being standard equipment onboard any respectable alien spacecraft.
But as computers you’re likely to have in your home or office anytime soon, the general advice is that you can forget it.
Except now you’re able to buy a tiny, experimental quantum computer for between $8,000 and $56,000 from a small company in China. And they’re shipping internationally. Seven-year-old SpinQ Technology of Shenzhen tells AIR MAIL they have sold machines to Duke University, the University of Arizona, and M.I.T., as well as to universities in Australia, Canada, and Norway.
SpinQ’s products are quite basic, although rather stylish, quantum computers that work at room temperature—no elaborate refrigeration towers needed—and allow users to familiarize themselves with the wholly new paradigm of solving math problems by exploiting the movement of electrons within vials of a specific substance, dimethylphosphite.
SpinQ computers come with their own operating system, Castor, and a bundle of demonstration applications to show their speed and ability at such functions as sorting large amounts of data, searching databases, and solving a few rather arcane problems.
You may be thinking that $8,000-plus is quite a lot for an individual to spend on what amounts to a fascinating conversation. You may also be thinking that if someone were to ramp up tariffs on imports from China, that $8,000 could soon increase by quite a lot.
But—and this is where the story gets almost as weird as the principles of quantum physics—there’s a place where it’s possible for anyone to experience a SpinQ computer for free (or for the cost of a voluntary donation).
It’s not in Silicon Valley or at the Smithsonian, but in what until recently was a head shop in Glastonbury, in the west of England, an almost entirely hippie town where every other store is a crystal shop, the hotel is 800 years old, and most of the inhabitants dress as if it’s Haight-Ashbury in 1969.
It’s here that Dr. Randall J. Stack, a Florida native who intended to be a Jesuit priest but instead became a personal-computing pioneer, is opening Dr. Randy’s Glastonbury Quantum Computing Centre, a nonprofit dedicated to explaining and demonstrating quantum computing to all comers.
Dr. Randy is a 60-year-old Dumbledore look-alike who not only has a quantum computer but a Cray supercomputer too, like the ones used by NASA. He shares the Main Street premises with his fiancée, an English artist and alternative therapist, Arabella-Bing Jemima Chevalier Zeglovskis.
Over the jet-engine noise of the Cray, which when we met was doing some calculations for a university in Spain, Dr. Randy explained his mission, saying, “It’s taken over 40 years for this technology to become part of the human collective consciousness, and now we want to optimize its absorption and acceptance by making it simple, friendly, inspiring, and engaging for all.
“I like to think of quantum computing as using nature to divine the answers to your questions. You’re playing music to the molecules at very high frequencies thousands of times beyond the range of human hearing. The music poses a problem. When the music stops, the state that the molecules are in as they come to rest gives us the answer,” he said.
He continued, “It’s brilliant for A.I., for modeling how the mind works, for weather simulation, and all calculations of that sort, where brute logic is less important than informed estimation.”
The Focal Diva Utopia Active Wireless Loudspeakers
Wireless speakers that even a hi-fi nut will love
When you recall how poor early wireless connections were (remember early Bluetooth?), it’s pretty extraordinary that these super-high-end, incredibly expensive, and pretty enormous new speakers from the superb French company Focal are almost fully wireless. (You do have to plug each cabinet into a power outlet.)
The media demonstration Focal gave recently in a stylish apartment close to the Paris Opéra was as awesome as you would expect from $40,000 worth of French-built amplification. It was one of those rare occasions when, if you closed your eyes, it was easy to imagine you were at a live performance. The radio technology to make that happen has taken decades to create. Focal says the system they have developed with their British partner company, Naim, is unique and does not compress the signal at all.
Each Diva Utopia cabinet, made of heavyweight polymer, contains four speakers and four amplifiers and can fill a very large room with exquisite-quality sound at a massive volume.
We were told many remarkable facts in Paris about the system’s electronics, but in the midst of all these impressive points, one stood out: The main signal-processing chip in the system, made by Texas Instruments, contains 160 billion transistors and does more calculations each second than there have been seconds since the big bang. That is just a small part of the electronics, separate from the radio and the amplification circuits.
For context, 50 years ago, when transistors were replacing vacuum tubes, a sophisticated stereo amplifier would contain between 20 and 100 or so transistors. This doesn’t mean these speakers are two to eight billion times better, but they’re certainly a marked improvement.
Aesthetically, are the Focal Diva Utopia cabinets something you would want in your living room? With their curvy shape and gray woolen covering, they are a lot less block-like and megalithic than most large speakers of this distinction. But even so, you may regard them as more of a den purchase than one for the distinguished salon.
The Translate App for Apple Watch
Say good-bye to the days of gesturing wildly to get your point across
It is estimated that the average iPhone owner uses only 10 to 20 percent of the device’s prodigious capabilities.
With the Apple Watch, I suspect it’s even less because getting to the apps can be rather fiddly.
Nevertheless, anyone traveling in the new year should be aware of one fantastic new feature that quietly appeared on the watch in the October 11.0.1 software update.
It’s an exceptionally user-friendly translation app. Fire it up by asking Siri to “Open Translate.” Select the language you want to speak or listen to, touch the microphone button and say what you want to say, and press the speaker icon to hear a translation loud and clear.
It’s simple and perfectly designed, and if you’d put it in a movie even 20 years ago, it would have seemed too optimistic by at least a few decades.
The Timeline of the Far Future
Find out what’s in store for humanity at your own peril
The turn of the year, especially in these momentous times, is often a time for reflection on where we are heading as a species.
Your columnist distinctly remembers the first New Year’s he was allowed to stay up until midnight—when 1969 turned into 1970, a year that sounded impossibly futuristic.
Back then, the most worrying issues were the effect of “computerization” on employment, mass starvation and societal collapse due to overpopulation, and, scariest of all, global cooling.
For the dawn of 2025, which also sounds quite advanced, Wikipedia has put together a fascinating “Timeline of the Far Future” that peers forward three sextillion years (a sextillion is 1,000 quintillion, which is 1,000 quadrillion, which is 1,000 trillion).
What’s top of the news three sextillion years from now? Well, the end of the most durable digital memory we currently have. And after a mere 7.2 million years, Mount Rushmore will have eroded into unrecognizability. Some 600,000 years after that, humanity is 95 percent likely to be extinct.
So happy New Year to all our readers and good luck for the future.
Based in London and New York, AIR MAIL’s tech columnist, Jonathan Margolis, spent more than two decades as a technology writer at the Financial Times. He is also the author of A Brief History of Tomorrow, a book on the history of futurology
