Original subtitles

[soft music]

[man] I have a unique ability to see things

that are likely to be transformational.

And sometimes they don't happen,

sometimes they're late, sometimes they're early,

but, by and large,

I have the ability to know

when something is gonna be successful.

[music continues]

[John] If you think about the origin of computing,

some of the firsts computers

were done with mechanical switches.

[soft click]

The computers of the 1940s had electronics like these.

This was the compute unit.

There were many of these units in an IBM computer

of the 1940s and 50s.

[motor rattling]

These are vacuum tubes

and these were used as the ones and zeros

in the computers of the day.

That was the state of the art.

[music continues]

[John] These modules called: "Solid Logic Technology,"

with two or three transistors,

lots of them in a system,

put together the System/360

that put a man on the moon

and got him safely back in 1969.

[motor rattling]

I'm not sure I would have strapped myself

on the top of a rocket

and gone to the moon being driven by that.

But it was a successful mission.

And this was the heart and soul

of the mainframes in the 1980s.

The reason IBM hired me

was because they couldn't make this work.

And the chips were falling off,

the wires were falling off, the pins were falling off.

But it was a great success,

and it became the core of the IBM Systems for decades.

All of this, all these boxes, is one computer.

Well, we replace all those boxes with... this box.

Actually

half of this box.

[music continues]

[John] In early 2007,

the CEO and chairman of IBM asked me

to go over and lead IBM Research.

And he said, "John, help us find

the next big things."

And I said, "OK, I don't...

I don't know how long it's going to take.

I don't know. We have to create it."

And by the end of the month,

I found two things

that I knew were gonna transform the world.

[man's voice] "Even a broken one of these on your wall

is right twice a day."

- Watson. - What is clock?

Clock is correct. And with that...

First thing I was introduced to was some work

they were doing in artificial intelligence.

When we did Jeopardy! with Watson.

That was a wake up moment

for the whole tech industry,

but for humanity, it said, "Oh, my God,

here's a computer that can basically,

in a sense, be as smart as a human."

The second thing I saw, in August of 2007,

that I knew would change the world

was the progress that IBM had made on quantum computing.

[music increases]

We can't comprehend

what these quantum computers are going to be capable of.

[music increases]

[music decreases]

[music stops]

[man 2] Once we dig out the bases,

we're gonna pound a piece

of four inch casing into the ground.

So it keeps everything

- from falling into our hole. - Right, right, right.

Because once we get through that,

the silt and sand will keep its form,

so it won't fall into our spoon hole.

So we're getting the real stuff,

- the good samples. - OK.

And then, you will leave the casing in there?

- Or are you pulling it out? - We'll pull it out.

- OK. - We reuse it.

- Yeah, yeah. - We have to leave it in there

- and something broke. - Yeah.

That is something you do not want to have happened.

OK.

[Dane] Till is pretty good to build on,

glacial till, brown till.

All the glaciers coming through

and just compacting everything over and over again.

So that's pretty stiff, pretty hard.

Sometimes as hard as rock

or rock, rock would be pretty good.

[soft music]

I don't know much.

Just a little bit, between yesterday and today.

That's just super rare.

And RPI got chosen for it,

so it's pretty cool.

[man 3] I was a student here as an undergrad.

I came back here

for graduate studies in electrical engineering

and then decided to stay here.

I've now been here over 42 years.

And what's been very interesting to me,

here at Rensselaer,

are all the challenges and opportunities

I've had to take on the, you know,

whatever's next around the corner.

The current challenge, obviously,

is putting in the first IBM quantum computer system

on a college campus in the world.

[music continues]

[man 4] I think we have enough stuff, what do you think?

I hope so.

So what we gotta do is pour a bunch of holes

and make it square

to get that block out of there.

And we hammer in these two inch hollow spoons

to take a sample of soil to six foot.

And then, they figure out

what kind of footer they need to put in

for their giant computer.

That'll do it.

[man 5] Troy is unique.

During the Civil War, was the third richest city

in the United States.

And really the whole Industrial Revolution,

a lot of people say started in Troy.

[Kolb] There was more Tiffany glass

in homes in Troy than in New York City.

The per capita income in Troy

was higher than the per capita income

in New York City.

But during the 20th century,

it sort of faded away a little bit

and didn't find what that next wave was to catch hold of.

[man 5] I've been in Troy 70 plus years.

It was a great town growing up in the 50s and 60s.

Things have changed,

like every place else.

[woman] I meet all types of people out in the world.

And when they find out that the beautiful product

that they're holding in their hand

was actually made here in Troy.

Maybe they were here during the 70s and 80s

when Troy was not something people talked about.

They think beautiful things are being made there.

[man 6] 1994, I came, you know?

When I come to here is ghost town.

Empty stores, all of them, you know?

Downtown is Troy. Nothing.

I think RPI is key to Troy.

Troy needs it.

And just bringing in the quantum computing,

like, that's just, that's just amazing.

That just blows my mind.

I gotta think about that, you know?

[Dane] My cousin used to go to RPI.

I'm not exactly sure what he went for.

I don't know if it was engineering or not, so...

Isn't this computer, like, one of four in the world?

Like the only one in the US now?

How much do you think it is?

[music increases]

[Juan] The biggest thing I can say

about quantum computing is,

you know, "If the tree falls in the woods"

"did it really fall if nobody hears it?"

Quantum computing can actually see

that tree fall in the woods.

[Dane grunting]

[Kathleen] I have heard of quantum computing

because of the newspaper,

but I can't say that I know exactly what that is.

[music continues]

[Rocco] It's the most powerful computer

ever.

Matter of fact, the gentleman

from IBM who was in charge

used to eat in our pizzeria all the time,

and he would tell me, he goes,

"Rocco, this is a big deal.

RPI's got the first one."

Uh, that's

pretty neat, I think, you know?

And why RBI.

This is amazing.

[Phoebe laughing] It was so...

I have, like, friends

- who work in acoustics. - Yeah.

And I told them I was coming here.

And they were like, "Oh, my God, like, I'm so jealous."

I really wanted you to sort of experience,

you know, where I sort of ended up.

[Curtis] I graduated from Rensselaer.

Polytechnic Institute in 1982,

went to a start up where I did

my first graphics processor for IBM,

and then moved to California,

where I worked for Sun Microsystems

and started a company called NVIDIA in my townhouse.

[upbeat music]

[newswoman] \h It is official NVIDIA has become

the third stock ever

to reach three trillion dollars in market cap.

[audience cheering]

[Curtis] You know, it's just been a different journey.

There's more outside purpose

than just being in your top ten,

you know, richest people in the world.

And to some extent,

I'm thankful that I didn't take

- the other journey. - [Phoebe agreeing]

Would you walk away

from 78 billion dollars

- to take care of your son? - [Phoebe agreeing]

Right.

That's the path I took.

And people say, "Would you do it different?"

And then I'm like...

- But then I want to be Curtis. - But you didn't.

I want to be Curtis.

[producer]

No.

Our graduates are a different breed of kids.

We're not out for fame.

We're never on the front page of the newspaper.

But our products and what we've done

has touched everybody in the world.

[music continues]

[Jenifer] In our archives here at Rensselaer,

we have photographs, scrapbooks,

pamphlets, maps, blueprints,

student notebooks,

letters documenting a lot of the engineering activity

that took place in the 19th century,

going back to the mid 1850s.

How many of our engineers were involved

in the construction of the Panama Canal?

[Jenifer] I can't remember exactly the sequence.

It goes the Brooklyn Bridge,

the Williamsburg Bridge,

Queensborough, Manhattan.

So RPI engineers did all of those bridges.

[man 7] It's not very interesting

if what you decide to create isn't useful for something.

We were established in 1824.

We were created in a moment

when the nation was going through

the early days of the Industrial Revolution,

and there was this recognition

that the nation needed to have higher ED institutions

that were producing graduates that could drive that.

[woman 2] Class of 1924, Allen Dumont,

helped enhance the cathode ray tube,

which kind of revolutionized TV in America.

[John] The first thing you obviously point to

is it's the first engineering school in the country.

OK. The first. That's nice.

[John] There's deep appreciation for STEM,

but a desire to translate that

into things that make the world better.

[Kolb] The first digital camera was invented by a grad.

The first floppy disk was invented by a grad.

Baking soda was invented by a grad.

You know, it's both the exotic technically,

as well as the very, you know, functional things

that we all use day in and day out.

[Curtis] We are surrounded by the researchers

that are going to work on these new algorithms,

that are going to figure out what industries

the quantum computer is most efficient at,

and that's why it's here, so that they can work on it.

[music continues]

JP Morgan Chase,

they have their own dedicated quantum computing research team

just for financial applications.

And just yesterday there's this

hedge fund guy, recruiter. He reached out to me.

He said, "Oh, it seems like you're about to graduate.

Do you want to come and work for us?"

I don't think I'm going to go for it.

[Osama] I think over here, uh,

I have the chance to do something more creative.

Over there, at the financial institutions,

I guess I would be making more money,

but it would be a little less meaningful, like this is nice.

[music continues]

[Osama] Basically, in quantum computing,

our algorithms can fail with some probability.

And let's say this is the success probability.

And as you can see over here,

it's around like let's say 50 %.

And we want to boost this up to almost like 100 % over here.

And to do that, you go through this kind of process

to make sure that at the end

you have a very good success probability.

This was the main idea behind the algorithm,

but in my case, like it didn't really help much.

[Osama] For quantum computers,

we don't really know how to use them very well,

But engineers just get things done, basically,

with very little regard

to the theory and stuff behind it.

[upbeat music]

[Osama] The good thing about undergrads is that

they have the liberty to try out new stuff,

to come up with new applications,

new uses, new algorithms

without the risk of failure or something like that.

Quantum Club right now

really is all about getting the undergrads involved

with quantum computing.

It's all about teaching you

to use the quantum computer, exchanging ideas

and learning from each other.

Are they going to have us, like, fix our posture or anything?

I'm fixing my posture. Pulling it together.

I need to pull it together.

I need to be a human.

This is fine.

Warning. If you don't use it for, like,

I think over five minutes, it'll auto turn off.

So then you have to turn it off and then turn it on again.

- You can figure it out. - OK. I'll be careful with that.

I'd say Quantum Club is going really well.

It's actually going exactly

kind of how we were planning on it going.

[Nick] Use this QR code right there

if you want to get enrolled

for the quantum computer unveiling.

And we'll just add you to the list like that.

Yeah.

[Nick] I initially was just coming along

to the, like, meetings with Queenie and Michael

because I was just pretty much driving Queenie

and, uh, but that...

I really like, gained a lot of interest in quantum.

We know absolutely nothing about it.

And it's like, we have the opportunity

to just explore the field and basically create the field.

[Michael] So within VS code, what you can do,

the command here is control shift...

[John] There's a common characteristic

that, uh, they're very smart people.

Most are geeky.

We just love it. We're geeks.

But we just want to make a difference.

[music continues]

[Michael] I have to compare myself to, like,

the people who worked on the earliest computers,

where the computer ran on punch cards,

and you had people feeding it

into this computer that takes up an entire room.

That's where we are with quantum.

It feels like I am a scientist inventing the computer again.

[Michael] That's what it feels like and it feels incredible.

[music increases]

So air is the Qiskit built in?

[Nick] The first time I saw:

"Why not change the world hanging over the bridge?,"

I thought like, "OK," you know?

I mean, that seems a bit a bit of, like a bit of a reach,

but now it's like that, we're here.

There are just people who are kind of genuinely interested

in just kind of making their little mark on the world.

[Michael] And I'm hoping to, you know,

build on the shoulders of giants

and kind of contribute to that knowledge that humanity has.

Thank you all so much for coming to the meeting today.

[John] We don't look at these things

as, well, we're competing with the person next to us

or, you know, we're competing with another great university.

We just think, "What are the problems that we want to solve?"

And without a lot of hoopla, we just go do it.

So this is a little like simulation I did

during my undergrad.

So this is just, like, a fluid flowing

over a small cylinder, right?

And even for these, like, very simple kinds of simulations,

it gets very, very expensive even on classical computers

and a lot of supercomputers that we have these days,

they spend a lot of their time, like, crunching numbers,

solving these kinds of problems.

That's what got me excited.

Like, yeah, if you have a quantum computer,

we could do these simulations, like real fast.

[man 8] This is the facility that houses

our leadership supercomputer.

You can think of it as taking a bunch of laptops

and really intelligently gluing them together,

and you'd probably have on the order

of a few thousand laptops.

Except the difference is those laptops

are now solving one problem

that we could never, ever do on the laptop.

So designing next generation wings Airflows,

designing of any sort of advanced manufacturing

tool piece of equipment.

So, for example, you've never seen

a more complicated machine in your life,

until you've seen a diaper processing machine.

And it actually takes advanced design

and modeling and simulation to do those things.

[soft piano music]

For a modern supercomputing facility,

it's a pretty substantial electrical system

that we have in here.

This system in total can consume

something like 600 KW of power,

which is something like 600 homes worth of power.

Even larger systems are out there

that consume multi-multi megawatts of power.

So small cities worth of power, roughly speaking,

the megawatt of power would cost

about a million dollars a year.

So welcome to our mechanical space.

Essentially, this is our big heat exchanger

between the two cooled water loops that we have running.

This is just how we keep the system cool,

uh, while it's doing the work that it's doing.

Right now we're running at 75 degrees on the inlet,

and it looks like it's putting out

eighty six or seven degrees on the output.

So that gives you a sense

of the heat removal of what's happening here.

So the most powerful supercomputers in the world

are about 100 times more powerful

than this system behind you, to put it in perspective.

Jumping to the next three orders of magnitude beyond that,

which is sort of how we mark things,

is really going to be a challenge.

And it's largely believed, "Can we even get there?"

So the leapfrog over that,

folks are thinking about quantum,

but it's fundamentally much more different than this.

And so every program we've ever written for our supercomputers

has to be rethought of, rewritten and redeveloped.

[music continues]

[Chris] We're now at the ground floor

of thinking about how to do that.

So it's really an exciting way to compute.

But of course it got a lot of challenges

and could be very scary.

But, you know, again,

that's what we want to do in the university,

is think about the things

that folks haven't thought of before.

[violin music]

[Kolb] Welcome to the Voorhees Computing Center.

Originally built as a chapel for the Saint Joseph's Seminary,

built around 1933.

Rensselaer took this building over in 1958,

time frame, and we turned it into a library in the 1960s.

[woman 3] By the 1970s,

there had been a big push to get a fine new library.

There was an intent to tear it down,

but there was so much response against that

because it's a beautiful stone building.

And the idea was, "What can we put

in that structure that will meet our needs?"

[Curtis] When I came to Rensselaer,

there was a premise

that they were going to get in my freshman year,

the IBM 360/3033 computer.

And this was a big deal.

[Tammy] Certainly, this was pulling in engineers

who really needed these whamming new tools.

The first semester, we had to type a punch cards.

And you'd submit your cards to somebody

who'd actually run it on the computer.

And there are all these jokes about kneeling down

and praying before your job would be executed, and so on.

And then in the second semester,

they installed the 3033 computer,

and we had terminals everywhere.

[Tammy] And it was really novel at the time.

The RPI would have the computers in a chapel.

What does that say about us?

[music increases]

[man 9] It was a phone call from John Kolb.

We began to chat

about the new computer that's going in

and where it's being placed.

And so John said,

"I'd like to know a little bit more

so that we could place the computer

in something of a context."

Why before these four individuals?

[Kolb] So the quantum computer will be

about right where I'm standing here.

You'll see behind it

these four original doctors of the Catholic Church.

[Edward] The individuals are known in Western history

as the Four Latin doctors.

Doctor meaning: "Someone whose writings

are to be noted with special merit."

Gregory, Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose.

The work that they did is still profoundly influential

beyond just the Christian church.

And some of the material that they did,

and that is with us today, people take for granted

and don't even think about how it came about.

[Kolb] How do we find new cures for diseases?

New modeling and simulation.

You know, this room will be part of that.

Getting past those bottlenecks.

[Tammy] The VCC is going through

yet another renovation as we speak,

and it's due to be rolled out in early 2024.

So we are apparently on schedule from what I hear.

[music increases]

We have some tours going on today.

I think there's going to be trustees on campus.

So I wore a jacket today for that.

I think the calm was back in August. [laughing]

I feel like I'm in the front end

of the hurricane right now.

Project Chapel has been a unique

opportunity and experience.

Yesterday we removed the glass wall and doors

that were in this area right here.

So this is new to me.

I have to admit, as a project manager,

of course, this is the first time I've been through

a quantum project like this.

[indistinct dialogue]

[Jeff] Without trying to sound like a martyr,

I delayed my retirement about a year

because of this project.

It's the first quantum computer installed

in any university in the world.

It's pretty cool.

You can't take that one away.

I actually think it's fun.

It's exciting. It's change.

[producer]

Hell, no.

All according to plan. No, you... we have a plan.

And we have a project plan and everything.

And there's dates, but it's, uh...

Maybe I don't like this analogy of going to war,

but it's like going to war. You have a plan,

you get into battle, and you have to change the plan

and you change the plan every day.

I've worked here 22 years.

My office has been here 17.

The first time I used this elevator was last month,

and it was because I was escorting somebody down.

I was always the two stairs at a time kind of guy

that was raised in the Roman Catholic Church.

It's very interesting to me

that the whole field of quantum computing

actually has a tight intersection historically

with metaphysics and philosophy.

And if you look at some of the the great founders

of the quantum computing effort in the early 1900s,

many of them had philosophy degrees

as their first degree.

Because quantum computing is at the atomic level,

it's at the very smallest level we understand in this world

and things behave very strangely.

[Edward] I think physics,

and this gets me into trouble

all the time with the physicists,

is ultimately philosophy,

because physics leads to the wonder of the universe

and who created it and why, and whatever.

[music ends]

[John] You really are dealing with a phenomenon of nature,

which is very much at the root of the universe

and everything that's known about energy

and matter and interaction.

[Edward] Science, as far as I'm concerned,

is the unfolding of the mystery of God.

Whether they use that language or not is another question.

That's another question.

But that's what I see.

That's what I see.

[ominous music]

[John] At it's fundamental core

uh, how those things are interacting?

What is exactly?

How did God do this?

Is something that I don't know if we'll ever understand.

[music ends]

[man 10] We can say that people understand how computers work,

but the reality is, like, most people don't understand

how a semiconductor works, right?

Or how a microprocessor works.

Or in AI, of course, it has entered the vernacular, right?

Because people get to experience them.

99.9999 % of people have never experienced

what it feels like to interact with a quantum computer.

I think we find ourselves

in the most exciting time in computing,

probably since the advent

of the first digital computers in the 1940s.

It is the first time in the history of computing

that the category has branched.

[soft music]

[woman 4] Every type of computer,

every type of computing thing,

from the abacus to the supercomputers

that we have now,

they're all classical computers.

Even with the emergence of AI and machine learning,

which are awesome technologies,

still classical.

Quantum computing is the first

entirely different type of computer.

[music increases]

[Olivia] A classical computer means

that it obeys the laws of classical physics.

[shuffling]

But what that actually boils down to

is everything that you type into the computer,

everything that you save,

everything that you download gets translated

into computer language,

which is actually just a series of zeros and ones.

So every word has a counterpart.

Every color has a counterpart into these zeros and ones.

This is how it processes information.

You can add, you know, a series of zeros and ones

and get a new sequence of zeros and ones,

which translates to the number that you were trying to add.

Makes perfect sense.

But when you're trying to use a computer

to understand nature

and to model the physics of the world around you,

it gets a little bit more complicated.

[ominous music]

[Olivia] When you peer down into the microscopic world

and you're at the atomic level.

Well, atoms and molecules don't obey classical physics.

They obey quantum physics.

[music increases]

[Olivia] So you have this machine

that's trying to simulate Laws

that it doesn't inherently understand.

A quantum computer obeys the Laws of quantum physics.

A quantum computer is basically a chip,

a superconducting chip

that has qubits on it instead of bits.

A quantum bit, a qubit, has the unique ability

to be a little bit of zero

and a little bit of one at the same time.

This is called a superposition,

and when you have a string of these qubits together,

that can all be a little bit of zero

and a little bit of one at the same time,

you can do this thing

where you entangle them together,

and that means that they can share their information

and share their properties with one another,

even across a long distance.

It's impossible for there to be

a classical analogy of what a qubit is

because classical objects, like a coin...

Yes. When you're spinning it,

it sort of looks like it's a little bit heads

and it's a little bit tails at the same time.

But if you write down the angle at which I spun it

and the velocity at which I spun it,

you could predict a 100 % of the time

how that coin would fall.

It looks random even though it's not.

However, on a qubit,

if you wrote down the Laws that govern the qubit,

you would not get the same measurement

every single time like the coin,

because it is dictated inherently by randomness.

It is non-deterministic and the coin is deterministic.

[man on video] Sometimes I hear people

coming to my lecture to say,

"I'm going to come to your lecture,

although I know I'm not going to understand anything."

It makes me feel bad.

Or when they come up afterwards they say,

"Oh, I enjoyed your lecture.

There was lots of fun,

but I didn't understand anything you said."

And you'll have to accept it

because it's the way nature works.

If you want to know the way nature works.

We looked at it carefully.

Look, that's the way it looks.

You don't like it?

Go somewhere else.

[audience laughing]

To another universe where the rules are simpler.

This is one of the most fascinating things

I think about the work that we're doing.

We don't know what's going on.

Reporters have gotten mad at me in the past,

because I have been unable to tell them

what is going on.

And the most brilliant minds in the entire world

can't tell you what's going on.

It works 100 %. It works.

But what is the interpretation of it?

Like, what do we picture in our head?

How can a photon go from being classical

to quantum at the same time?

We don't... we don't know.

But that doesn't mean that we can't use it.

[soft music]

[man 11] Many problems that we want to solve in nature,

we can't solve them with classical methods.

And physicists have been trying them

for many, many decades.

So quantum is the first time we can solve these problems.

We don't know how to solve it with quantum computing,

but we know that if we can get a quantum computer

to mimic the equations of nature,

we can explore in regions

where we've never been able to explore.

[Jeff] Good to see you, Mike.

[Mike] Nice to see you.

How are you?

Hi, Tom, I'm Jeff Miner.

- Jeff. - How are you doing, sir?

Good to see you, Jim.

Alex. Nice to meet you.

[Jeff] This was designed to be

the most acoustically perfect concert hall in the world.

And Curtis Priem is the same donor

who has done the donation

for the quantum computer.

[Jim] Oh, wow.

[Curtis] I don't want to donate money after I die.

And then, wish good luck.

I'd like to see it happen in my lifetime.

And so I'm like looking at the final set of dominoes.

And I'm not going to create a quantum computer.

I'm not going to identify the applications for it

or become rich off of some startup

that is using an application for a quantum computer.

All I can do is enable people

to actually go and do their stuff.

OK, this will work.

[Martin] You've heard Curtis tell the story

of why he came to RPI,

which is that he knew that they had just gotten

an IBM supercomputer

and he was going to be able to play with it.

That's what's going to happen here.

I'm confident that our faculty are going to explore

uses of this computer for their disciplines.

I'm confident that we'll develop curriculum materials

that are really useful.

But I'm equally confident

that amongst all those students

that are going to be playing

with the quantum computer is a Curtis Priem,

who's going to go out

and invent a graphics processor

that creates one of the most valuable companies in the world.

[music increases]

[Jeff] There's just this aura,

this magical aura surrounding this piece of hardware.

I think we had half a dozen security officers

present as this was coming in.

It looked like we were bringing in

some gold from Fort Knox or something.

It's impressive. It's all get out.

It's just this work of art.

So there it is, safe and sound.

[Olivia] The most important component, probably,

that people are familiar with of a quantum computer

is actually not the quantum computer.

It's the shiny chandelier part.

So, a quantum computer just looks like

a typical classical computer chip.

It just looks like a tiny little piece of metal.

It lives, however, inside this giant behemoth

called a dilution refrigerator,

which looks like a shiny gold chandelier,

but all that that is supposed to do

is basically keep this chip cold.

And when I say cold, like insanely cold,

like 15 millikelvin colder than outer space cold.

[music continues]

[Jim] So we flow a mixture of helium three and helium four.

It's a superfluid.

The physics cause temperature reduction

at each one of these stages,

so it gets colder and colder

as you go down the dilution refrigerator.

But it's extremely low power.

So this whole thing has cooling power

of maybe four watts.

Just a tremendous amount of technology in this.

I mean, you're looking at something

that's the better part of $800 000 right there.

[Jay] When you're trying to do something

that's never been done before,

it's not like you're learning a test

or going up against something.

You have to be surrounded by people

that you can bounce these ideas off.

And this is a big part

of the culture that we have here.

This is exactly what I expect to see

from the RPI students.

[laughs]

[John] You know, we'll be sitting here

a decade or two from now and say, "Well,

that was done by an RPI student,"

and they did their work on that System One,

that wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the fact

that that system was at RPI.

[Michael] There are so many questions

that we don't have answers to.

There's people in the thought of,

we need to understand everything

about these quantum particles.

We need to understand everything

about how they work before we do any more work on them,

because we shouldn't be working on something

that we don't understand.

Do these things work?

Do we need to know how they work? Not necessarily.

Just shut up and compute.

[music continues]

[Dario] Quantum computers have reached a tipping point.

One that is taking our world

into what we have coined

as an era of quantum utility.

It opens up the opportunity to utilize

that power to solve problems

that are intractable using classical computing,

we need to prepare our students and our researchers

for the dawn of the quantum computing age.

We have these mental blocks put in place

because we understand liability,

we understand risk,

and these kids are coming in

and they basically don't have any limitations.

They don't see anything

that's actually going to stop them.

And all you can do is just sit back and watch,

and enjoy the show.

[music ends]

[cheers]

[journalist] In a world of science and computers,

all eyes are on RPI in Troy tonight.

As John Gray shows us,

they're making a quantum leap

into quantum computers.

[reporter] In the world of computers,

this is the holy grail.

The IBM Quantum System One

for RPI students in the Quantum Club.

It's like being a kid in a candy store.

[Michael] They can do things

that classical computers just can't, right?

And so that ability is just what excites me,

that we're going to move on to a new era of computing.

[journalist] Now, the quantum computer system

will be fully operational in January.

[journalist 2] Now, John also tells us

that the most exciting part of all of this

is that the technology is so advanced,

they truly don't know what it's capable of

or the breakthroughs it could bring.

[soft music]

[Osama] Basically, we're just moving humanity forward,

I think, by knowing more.

We're all about learning more.

And this is like this whole uncharted territory

right in front of us.

So we're kind of the explorers in this new era.

[Martin] Quantum computing will transform disciplines

because it will solve problems that we can't currently solve.

But we're not exactly sure which those problems are.

And by having this here,

by having the opportunity to operate it,

I think it's going to create an industry

that grows up based on using quantum computing

in transformative ways.

[music continues]

Materials, lighter weight, stronger chemistry,

new molecules, math, you name it.

The goal is to actually find new stuff

that we can then turn into products

that will make our lives better.

[interviewer] Great. Thanks so much.

- OK. - Thank you.

I hate cameras.

[laughs]

[Curtis] I'm not trained for that.

I'd rather have this discussion.

What's your degree?

In computer and systems engineering.

- That's what mine was. - Yeah, right.

I got a minor in computer science.

- OK, interesting. - And also a minor in music.

- On top of it. - Yeah, I'm a musician.

- What do you play? - I play saxophone.

- Cool, cool. - Yeah.

[man 12] I grew up in a digital age.

Quantum is almost more like analog.

It's like things that really happen in the world,

except at such a low level.

And it's such a... weird level

that, you know, to try to get intuitive grasp for it

is going to take people who grow up with it.

The ones who are able to say,

"Here's what's really going on."

[music continues]

[Hendler] Partly those of us who've been around a long time

sort of have our own way of thinking about things

that's a little bit baked in.

Some of these kids are looking at,

"Hey, what if we try this?"

This is what it does.

This is how it models the universe at a deeper level.

[man 13] This demo helps us visualize

the windows of susceptibility

for different diseases during neurological development.

It's also showing us the protein protein interactions

of the individual genes with other genes.

This was the work of a team of RPI undergraduates,

and continues to be the core of a series

of courses in data analytics.

[Hendler] What we're hoping is,

as people use the quantum machine,

we're able to do visualizations

that help people understand their data.

And we have students who've enjoyed

building not just the demos,

but the things that make the demo work.

I point at some of them right here.

[Hendler] Your undergraduates generally looking

for some really cool thing to do.

I think we're just at that moment in time

where something's happening.

The new rise of this,

just the way it's going to grow,

the way somebody is eventually going to say,

you know, here's a commercial thing

we never thought about before

that we can do now.

All right. Who do I have here?

- I'm Curtis. - I'm Arthur.

Hi, I'm Nathaniel. Nice to meet you.

- I'm Queenie. - I'm Nick.

- That's me. - I'm Michael.

- What grades are you? - I'm a freshman.

- Freshman as well. - Junior.

- Junior. - Junior.

Cool.

All right, so you have a club?

- Yeah. - Who's the spokesperson?

[laughter]

- Talk to me. - Sure, so...

Uh, our main goal right now,

what we're mainly doing is Wednesdays at 8 p.m...

[music stops]

[whirring]

[Jeff] How do you plan for something

that's never been done before?

The answer is you adapt.

So I updated the issue register.

We will make a quick fly through this.

Some of it you're already aware of.

But the status did change.

[Jim] Let me explain what we've got going on.

[Jeff] We don't have to go through the vibration analysis

or the orientation,

the door location, the structural support.

As you know, the mat slab got poured.

I guess it was last Friday.

It seems like a month ago already.

[upbeat music]

[Jeff] On Monday, I believe,

is when they're going to start erecting steel.

They're going to put the steel columns up,

build the steel frame upstairs for the platform.

[Jim] So right now we're building the base of the frame.

We build the base, we build the mid to mid wall,

the back wall and then the top.

And we're actually probably half a day ahead of schedule

at the rate we're going.

[Jackie] They've done some installations now.

It's different because it's all very new.

I feel like in some respects

they're also learning as well.

- [Jeff] Flip it over? - [Jim] Flip it over

and then we got a boatload to load in there.

[Jim] We've installed,

about... I think this is our number six.

And every time we iterate

we learn better techniques.

So slight change in plans.

We've never done it this way before,

but it's going to save us a lot of time, aggravation...

[Jeff] He things that a month ago

I was most worried about,

I'm actually almost least worried about now

that, you know, the structural support

and pouring concrete in the basement

of a live data center.

[music continues]

[Jeff] I was losing sleep over that.

It's terrifying at times.

And then I take solace in people like Jim Speidel.

Square. It's a rectangle.

So who's going to make that measurement?

- I know, I know. - You need 3/1000 of an inch.

[Jim] I've been in this line of work,

I've been with IBM for...

In June it'll be 47 years, so...

I've worked on everything

from submicron field effect transistors

to large supercomputers to this.

So more of the same, but different.

Every project is a new challenge.

This is one of the greatest projects I've ever worked on.

[Jackie] On the academic side,

- they've never done this before. - Right, right.

How can they get people

using and learning about quantum?

[music continues]

[soft music]

[indistinct conversation]

[Jim] Yes, yes.

[man 14] I've seen lots of YouTube videos,

but never seen one like in front of me.

So I walked into that room

and it just like realized that's the foundation.

Wow. I used to stand there, so...

Because it used to be a classroom,

so I know, oh, now,

ten years, 20 years from down the road,

I can tell my students, or like my children someday,

"You know that IPM first quantum computer,

were you're standing right now?

"I used to stand there to teach." [chuckling]

Yeah, that's the most exciting part about it.

And using the quantum computer to do analytics.

Amazing. Hell, yeah.

It's going to be great.

That classroom there,

the content computer is here, so...

[indistinct dialogue]

Yeah. Exactly.

Yeah. This is this is great.

[Thilanka] So you asked me,

how it's going to help the average person?

[music stops]

My answer is imagine,

we are all going to face threats,

vulnerabilities and risks from climate change.

And if we can find better solutions quickly,

effectively, it's going to help everyone.

So, regardless, whether you're a student

or a farmer or an engineer,

it's not only we are solving problems

to the people in this country,

we are solving the problem

that affect the world, the globe.

So we are trying to solve global problems.

I think with this quantum computer at RPI,

our students will solve those problems.

I'm positive about it.

I'm excited

about how our students are going to tackle these.

The most pressing problems in the world

using this beautiful equipment.

[laughing] Yeah.

[soft violin music]

Hey, everyone. My name is Michael.

I'm one of the co-presidents

of the Quantum Computing Club at RPI.

Qiskit Fall Fest is a really big event for us,

and it's the first real quantum event

that we've had of people coming together

and gathering in the interest of quantum.

- Yeah. - Hi. What's your name?

[Olivia] So you program

the quantum computer through Qiskit.

When you program it,

the instruction that you're writing

gets translated into an instruction

that your instruments can understand.

And then it goes and it does it

just like you would read a recipe and say,

"OK, first I need to dice my onions."

[music continues]

[Michael] We have talented speakers

and we have a hackathon running from 1:00 to 5:00.

We actually have an exclusive reservation

on one of IBM's system.

So happy hacking

and a really enjoyable Qiskit Fall Fest.

[Michael] I think it's going pretty well.

Um, you know, I'm really happy with the turnout.

I'm seeing new faces,

and I think people,

for the most part, are understanding,

um, and they're learning.

[Hendler] We have two people sitting next to each other,

one who's trying to come up with unbreakable codes,

and the other one who's trying to do quantum algorithms

to break those codes.

By working together,

they're actually making interesting progress.

[Olivia] How are we going to use something

that we can't picture, that we can't describe,

that we can't visualize to do math

that couldn't have possibly been done?

It's so weird.

And we just have to train our brains

to think in a completely different way.

[Michael] It can feel impenetrable.

It's kind of just one more piece to the puzzle

that kind of exists as a challenge

for all computer scientists.

[music ends]

[man 15] So we've coined a phrase:

"The joy of research."

It's a sense that you really are working

with thoughts, ideas, facts, data

that haven't come together before.

[Robert] So we can simulate molecules now, right?

Simple molecules.

We can then simulate more complex molecules.

Then we could be looking at cells.

Then we could be looking at organs.

Then we could be looking at the human body.

A digital twin of the human body

which was partly powered by quantum computing.

[Robert] The way the quantum computers happened

at RPI is very atypical.

Normally, to bring that onto a campus,

we plan for years,

we build the expertise,

we build the reputation,

we build all the proof points.

And then somebody is confident enough to say,

"OK, you're the best. Here it is."

This happened a very different way.

It happened very quickly.

And now we're building the understanding,

the intuition, the planning,

the intellectual infrastructure around it.

[Jay] When we think of like one of the bigger milestones

that we want to achieve is we want to do something

that is either cheaper, faster or more efficient

on a quantum computer than a classical computer alone.

And we call this: "quantum advantage."

But to answer that question

of how do I map interesting problems

to quantum circuits?

That's actually very hard algorithm question.

And for us to get to quantum advantage,

there has to be discovery.

And that's the work that I would like to see

the people at RPI explore is,

"What problems can be mapped efficiently

to quantum circuits?"

[man 15] If you have, like, a free energy landscape

that has a lot of local minima in it,

but you're really searching for a global minimum,

like in protein folding,

this can be a very difficult problem

for a classical computer to really explore that space,

whereas a quantum computer has access

to an exponentially large space.

- That's an actually nice idea. - Yeah.

So that actually is. Yeah, yeah.

[Joel] It's kind of a quantum parallel.

[Robert] Just very occasionally there's an "Aha" moment,

an encapsulated moment in time,

like a minute or so, you can say,

"I thought of something new."

The rest of the time it's as much perspiration

as it is inspiration.

When people started the Human Genome Project,

they thought they wouldn't live to see it happen,

and it happened much faster than expected.

At some point, they knew it was going to work.

Are we there with quantum?

Is that the moment we can be with quantum?

You know, we can see all the challenges,

but can we see the light at the end of the tunnel?

[music stops]

[soft music]

[Hendler] Every 50 or 100 years,

humanity kind of comes across a new power.

It was electricity in the early 1900s.

[explosion]

It was nuclear in the mid 1900s.

Well, I worked for the Atomic Energy Commission.

They're going to build a plant here.

[Hendler] I'd like to say it was information,

as the Internet and web formed,

that again changed the world.

[woman's voice] Internet is that massive computer network.

Allison, can you explain what internet is?

[Hendler] I think quantum is the start

of one of those new waves.

[music continues]

What usually happens is the start of the wave,

then pulls with it a lot of the other stuff.

It's going to be bringing together

traditional computing,

quantum computing,

artificial intelligence may be part of the bridge of that.

And I think by bringing those things together

and really thinking about them as a whole,

we do have a chance to solve

some of these big problems.

Whether it's something, quote, as simple as cancer

or something as complicated as climate change.

I think we really are looking at the beginning

of a new generation of computing,

and we're going to need it.

[music ends]

[soft violin music]

[Jeff] We've been working towards this for months.

The last week was particularly hectic,

as we were waiting for critical deliveries of nitrogen

and liquid nitrogen and helium,

which all came on site yesterday. [soft laugh]

About a week late.

I lost some sleep the other night

worrying about liquid nitrogen, believe it or not, you know.

So I woke up two in the morning.

Uh, Sunday night.

How am I going to do this?

Running about five hours late today.

[Jeff] So the vitrine frame has been getting constructed.

It's aluminum, extruded aluminum parts,

thousands of fasteners in it.

There's an area for the gas handling equipment.

There is an area for the electronics.

And then the front part of this quantum computer

houses what's called a cryostat.

Inside is what we call the chandelier.

The process that we're seeing right now

is the lowering of the cryostat into the frame.

There's an aluminum piece up there

that they're about to bolt into place.

They call it the horse collar.

And so the whole system gets suspended

from that horse collar

which sits upon that cantilever frame.

So this is actually a critical point.

Once the horse collar gets secured,

all these people are going to breathe easier.

Until that point, everybody's on pins and needles right now,

including me.

This way. Quarter inch.

[constructor] Tom, you've got to go at least another 20 degrees.

[engineer] OK. One. Two. Three. Twist.

There you go.

Tom, put a pin in.

[laughter]

[Jim] We'll have to remove those outer vacuum vessels.

Remove the inner shield cans

and remove all the specialized packing apparatus.

Then we'll reassemble it

and begin the cool-down process.

[Jeff] The cryostat has some very sensitive

intellectual property from IBM inside it.

When the cryostat gets opened,

nobody outside of IBM personnel

are allowed to visually observe this thing.

It's a trade secret.

[music increases]

[music stops]

[Dario] Fear very often comes from a lack of understanding.

[soft music]

For me, I'm not a technological determinist,

and I know many other colleagues,

you know, in my profession, differ from that.

They say technology is destiny.

Whatever can be created

obviously will be used,

and there's nothing you can do to stop it.

I am not a believer in that,

and it's not because I'm denying its force.

What I don't like at all

is when we have our leading technologies

that feel that their future is outside

their fellow citizens,

that somehow they're transcending, right?

The rest of humanity.

I think that that's a very dangerous situation

because the rest of society says,

"You're not on the same boat."

The people who are creating this technology

are humanists and are citizens,

and are connected to a well-working society.

[Jay] What draws me to quantum?

Um...

The reason why I'm working

on quantum computing is the best way.

Actually, I don't even know how to say it.

It's just hard. So hard things are fun.

Someday we'll figure out a way

to make this a little easier.

I like working on stuff.

I mean, I've always been a tinkerer,

you know, whether it's cars or the old computers

back in the 20th century.

And it's fun to like, you know,

actually get your hands onto something,

turn some screws and figure out

why something is working or not working.

That's a lot of us.

[Jay] If you spend your whole life

working on how to do something,

it becomes part of you, right?

[music stops]

So are you familiar

with the low temperature physics?

Um, OK.

So, questions.

When you want to become a physicist,

you want to play with things,

and you get bored easily.

And everything...

You cannot work in a routine job.

There is no day like the other.

And it's truly the best job in the world for a physicist.

[upbeat music]

Obviously, we want to be mind of static,

so our chairs are grounded.

Uh, the blue mass that you see

there are actually grounded to the ground pin

of the and and then when you work,

you ground yourself.

This lab is all about testing

and seeing how well our devices are performing

coming out of our fabrication,

packaging and processing steps.

The last few years has been focused on

testing and characterizing Eagles.

An Eagle was our first 100 qubit processor,

which was 127 qubits.

We introduced it back in 2021,

and it was really the first

in the industry to break 100 qubits.

That Eagle processor that's in there

came through this lab,

went through Daniela's hands.

She gave it a score,

and she marked it good enough to go for RPI.

And yeah, what you're looking at is really our Eagle payload.

It's both a magnetic shield

and also it's a light tight shield

meant to prevent stray electromagnetic fields.

I'd say that every now and then there's these...

Uh, let's just try.

Yes. And it works.

- Experiments. - And sometimes.

And sometimes they work, sometimes they don't.

But we want them to be trying. Right?

[producer]

Uh...

I think it depends on the type of surprise.

- Right? Yeah. - Yes.

Something bad can lead you to something fantastic

around the corner. So... yeah.

And over time,

that

that all leads to the progress of our overall roadmap.

[music continues]

So back early in 2016,

we first put the IBM Quantum Experience online.

And this is where many people started to use

quantum computing for the first time.

But how are we going to make bigger and bigger systems

so that we could do something

that was beyond what you did with classical computing?

And this is what we set out to do over the next few years

with the release of Falcon, Eagle,

and eventually Heron.

In the last few years, we've really focused

on targeting how to scale

the number of qubits in our quantum processors.

With the various iterations of processors,

every one of them introduced a new innovation.

[Jay] At the start, from a hardware perspective,

it was about scaling.

But then, Heron was about,

"How are we going to bring a new gate?"

A new gate that gives us much, much better control

and allows us to have less errors in our system.

[Olivia] So gates are

what we use to control the qubit

and to put it into different states.

So if we can take the qubit

and put it from the zero state into the superposition state,

and then we have another gate that entangles it with another qubit,

and then another gate that entangles it with another qubit.

And then we flip one on its side,

and we spin one a little bit to the left.

That sequence equates to an algorithm.

Of course, having a large number

of good quality qubits is important

because that gives you more available space

to process information with.

But what we are really focused on in the future

is how many gates we can apply,

because that equates to how complicated an algorithm

or how complicated an instruction manual

that we can process through the quantum computer is.

[Jerry] And so right now we're really looking at Heron

being sort of the architecture

by which we're going to embark on

for the rest of our roadmap, looking forward.

And if all this succeeds,

we're setting our targets to demonstrate

error corrected quantum computers,

like Starling and Blue Jay,

where Starling is 100 million gates,

Blue Jay is one billion,

in 2029 and 2033.

We chose birds.

I think together we came up with the idea, right?

Like, I've always liked birds, but it was...

Yeah, but I did choose the one for 2033, for...

Named it Blue Jay, it's actually named after him, so...

Not sure how to respond to that.

I think I met Jerry first.

I think he, um...

He found my wallet, if I remember correctly.

I saw the wallet, I picked it up,

I looked at it and I said, "Oh, Jay Gambetta,

I've seen him around a little bit."

At that time, I didn't really know him that well.

We started working on a project together.

Then we played a lot of video games.

We played a lot of video games while, you know...

We talk about our experiments and papers

while playing Halo, right?

- Halo, right. - Halo, a lot of Halo.

Was it Halo or Call of...?

- No, no. Halo. - We did Call of Duty, but...

- A little bit. - But yeah.

But I think mainly Halo.

Then after that we've, uh...

I don't know, continue to give each other a hard time.

[soft music]

[Jeff] I taught for many years here

in our Information Technology Program,

and I would tell them at the beginning of the semester,

"Any big project you work on,

an initiative,

I don't care how technical, cutting edge it is,

it's going to be 70 % people,

it's going to be about 20 % process,

and it's only going to be about 10 % technology.

"And the technology will always be the easiest part."

Now the students scoff at me and they...

[fakes voice] "Oh, no, that's not true.

I know how to program in ten languages,

you know, whatever, whatever."

And I'll say, "When's the last time a compiler lied to you?"

[chuckling] "When's the last time a parser, uh,

protected its job and sabotaged the project?"

I said, "People are difficult." [laughing]

[upbeat music]

Major progress being made today,

installing an exciting piece of technology at RPI University.

Putting the finishing touches on their new quantum computer.

Today, five massive panes of glass

hoisted up by a crane

and moved into the Voorhees Computing Center...

By September,

students had already formed a Quantum Computing Club.

[Jeff] We've been working towards this

for six months at least.

In fact, many of the questions that come to people

when they start talking about the project is,

"Well, what day are you bringing the glass to?

What day are you bringing the glass to?"

[Jeff] We looked at several other options.

Removing masonry from the doorways.

We looked at removing a slate roof,

and then found out there was a concrete floor below it

that we couldn't get through.

So this was our

next most available option,

because what we're talking about is

essentially a 1000 pound sale,

and they're going to be hoisting it 40 feet in the air,

and we're going to do it five times.

So

the wind is a big concern.

[music continues]

It seems pretty calm out here.

Inside's a little more frenetic right now.

[music continues]

[Jeff] Today alone,

we have six or seven different companies right now,

many of whom, several of whom,

half these people have never been here before.

This is their first day here...

The thing is I'm running out of time.

- I know, yeah. - Let me get this on the floor.

including an entire crew from Italy.

So there's a little language going on there.

[in Italian]

It's a ballet. It's just, "Who's got the lead right now?"

Actually, it's more like a jazz session.

[music continues]

[Jeff] Once the glass

and its frame is slid through the opening

then the spider crane on the inside

will be rigging the glass on the inside

in a very tight confined area.

- Yeah, this is all right. - Alright.

Here we go. Here we go.

[Jeff] Swinging it over the computer,

gently lowering it down to the floor,

and they'll bring the glass into our staging area.

[music continues]

The first one, by the way,

is going to be the most interesting.

Because the first one,

they're going to figure out how to do this

in real time. It'll probably take

four times longer than the rest of them.

And then, presumably,

the other four will go smoother after that.

[music stops]

[violin music]

[Jeff] My schedule said

that I was going to be skiing in Colorado this morning.

This time I'd be looking at the sun coming up

on one of the fourteeners.

And I canceled that trip

so that I could take part in this today

and be part of this. So it's, uh...

So far, so good. I don't...

I think I made a good call.

[music continues]

[indistinct chatter]

[in Italian]

[in Italian]

[music continues]

[applause]

[laughter]

[music stops]

It's a good thing we have a ten by ten scaffold.

[indistinct chatter]

- [Jeff] Yes, sir. - [man whispers]

- [Jeff] What? - [whispers]

- [Jeff] One of them, is correct? - Yeah.

Is that...? That's what the goal is.

You build something that needs to be squared.

Thanks.

That's a great shot right there.

That's really nice.

[Jeff] I just, uh...

Sean just told me. He says,

"One of the glass panes is cracked out there."

I'm going to go take a look.

[Jeff] I... What?

Yeah, that's what I'm going out to check.

Yeah, we have one. They lost the corner.

It got cracked.

[whirring]

Up in that corner.

Unplanned

setback.

[producer]

I don't know yet.

[hesitating]

I don't know yet.

I've just send you guys a photo of it.

So Sean said that

they they took it and they brought it over here,

you know, getting ready to prep it here they went...

- So I don't know. - Do they know when it happened?

I don't know.

Yeah.

[Jeff] Not the first challenge, but this one's a little...

Uh, what's the word?

This one's a little more irreversible. [chuckling]

I don't know what their warranty, guarantees are.

Replacement.

We shall see.

Stay tuned.

[whirring stops]

[soft music]

[man's voice] Welcome back to The New Quantum Era.

Sebastian here.

I'm really thankful for the opportunity to join you tonight.

This is an historic event.

Before I go to the other panelists,

I have to ask you,

"What was it like to install a quantum computer

in a chapel from the 1930s here?"

So that was pretty challenging.

[laughs]

Um, but it looks great.

[Sebastian] Yeah. It does.

[Jeff] What ensued over the next several days

was a lot of discussions with the glass manufacturer,

with IBM, etc., etc.

Instead of putting a single ten foot piece of glass in,

how about if we did two five foot wide pieces of glass

that opened in the middle,

rather than opened as one big swing?

We did not require the special rigging

and we could accelerate the replacement of the glass.

So as a project manager,

it could have been a lot worse,

but it ate up most of my contingency,

to be honest.

[Nick] Plain. Wait, wait, no. There's a T here.

- Isn't it played over? Yeah. - Like that?

- Oh, oh. - Oh.

- I guess it is. - [soft laugh]

Are you excited to hold the ribbon?

I'm very excited for it,

but I have no idea, like, what to expect.

Yeah. I mean, I think it's a lot

- to be, like, on TV. - [laughs]

[indistinct chatter]

[upbeat music]

[Sebastian] I just wonder what you think

about the collaboration

between academia and industry

to drive this sort of stage of technology development?

[Hendler] We're facing as a species

these global challenges.

Do you really need somebody who's saying,

"Look, I realize it won't yet

solve this business problem."

But if we someday want something that can,

we have to start mowing that direction.

Wait, wait, what's -3.0?

[hesitating]

[soft laughter]

Oh, wow.

- Oh. - Oh.

Oh...

- Oh! - Oh!

Oh...

It ran, it ran.

- Oh, my God. - But what did it do?

I think it's wrong. It's wrong.

[music continues]

[Osama] So I think there is also this aspect

of being able to learn the language and cross bridges

because people hear quantum and they kind of get spooked from...

- Right, right. - So...

I think that bridge also needs to be crossed through.

[Nick] For a nuclear reactor simulations,

if we have a particle

and we want to know where it's going to be

in 10,000 flights.

There's a lot of randomness.

Like, there's just some that leak.

What we're trying to do

is apply a quantum circuit to a particle.

And then we could do that

for like a million or a billion particles,

like reasonably fast.

It could be helpful in like managing it better.

- OK. - It looks good.

Best to stay humble, you know, not get our hopes up.

- Yeah. - Because I've never even, like,

ran this on a quantum computer yet.

We're just kind of like doodling around

in the dark with our eyes closed.

[music increases]

[Curtis] You know, I understand the importance

of having everybody: researchers, graduates,

undergraduates all have access to it.

It's like, all of a sudden,

I'm going back 45 years

to when I was a kid and it's like,

"Wow, we have terminals."

[man 16] We got to thank Curtis for what he did.

President Schmidt for allowing RPI

to become the epicenter of this.

We believe that the practical utility

of quantum computing is right around the corner.

And I say right around the corner,

two to five years.

And so it's really important to get going.

Working with academia,

working with the faculty researchers,

working with the students.

By the way, it's not just New York State.

In this case, RPI is at the epicenter of this for the globe.

[Kolb] Good morning, RPI.

Now come on. Good morning RPI!

[applause]

[Kolb] Our first order of business this morning

is to cut the ribbon.

To do that, it is my pleasure to link up...

Look at that over here.

[chuckling]

[cheers]

[Kolb] \h Link up with the 19th president

of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,

Doctor Martin J. Schmidt,

class of 81. All yours, Mr. President.

[music continues]

[music increases]

[music ends]

[audience gasping]

Oh, wow. That's pretty cool.

[Martin] Can he hear us? Can he hear us, John?

We just lost power in this building, so...

Now we get to do a little bit

of a tap dance up here, so, uh...

We'll see how long it'll take to get back...

[soft piano music]

[camera rattling]

[music continues]

[clicking]

[John] Your life today

will touch IBM computers a thousand times.

You'll never know.

[rattling stops]

Book an airline flight.

It's going to go through an IBM system, hardware and software,

but it's not going to say, "IBM, IBM. This is IBM's."

And I think that's very similar to RPI.

[Jay] I think it will change us by us not even knowing

when you're

people are using the mobile phone.

They're using advanced technology to talk,

but it just works.

So it'll be something in the back

that is doing a calculation

that it will just eventually

for everyone will become for granted.

[music continues]

[Robert] It will fuel computational capabilities

that people just will become accustomed to.

But for that brief moment in time

will seem absolutely extraordinary.

[Jeff] I worked on a dairy farm as a teenager.

Exhausting, nasty, dirty work.

And we'd get to the end of the day,

and I just want to go in and crash on a sofa.

And my uncle would stop me and he'd say,

"Oh, come on. Very important. Come over here."

Look at that field. Look at that haymow.

This is appreciation hour.

Appreciate what we did today.

Absorb it.

"Let it give you strength to do the next challenge."

I look at this Chapel Project,

and many of the projects I've worked on, this way,

"Wow. I did this.

Now what will I tackle next?"

It probably won't be in this context,

but I have things I want to...

I want to build a tree house for my grandkids.

And, of course, I'm an engineer.

It won't be a rickety treehouse.

[music continues]

[Osama] What we're really trying to do over here

is trying to figure out where the electrons are

for hydrogen atom, for example.

These are what the electron orbitals look like.

We have all these circular ones,

these dumbbell shaped ones

and some other more interesting looking ones.

We want to know where we are expecting

to see those electrons

to the 127 qubits that we have on our device,

these three qubits, 94, 95, 96.

These have been assigned to the ones that we are using.

I hope everybody is following.

These equations that we're trying to solve,

these are really, really old.

Like Paul Dirac, like, discovered these equations

back in the 1920s, I think.

We just don't have the computing resources

to solve those equations.

I'm lost in tabs.

You heard of Schrodinger's cat being alive or dead

at the same time, right?

So we can try to run that on our quantum computer.

All right, it's complete. All right.

So this is a superposition

of all the possible quantum states, right?

Zero, zero, zero, all the way to one, one, one

and everything in between all those combinations, right?

This is literally like an amazing physics experiment

when they discovered these things.

Like these were mind blowing discoveries.

But now we can just do this in such a controlled manner.

I mean, I find it just amazing

that we can run this very intricate physics experiment

just by clicking some buttons over here.

You can just say, like,

my research is the most important or the best.

And I think in all of science and math,

like we're just standing on the shoulders of giants.

And I think you can only be a giant in,

like, hindsight, not in the present.

[applause]

[Michael] We have a device of incredible power

that puts us at the bleeding edge

of computation right now.

I want to thank all our honored guests

for making this possible.

For their contribution to quantum computing,

I invite the Quantum Computing Club

to come up and present them

with Cordyceps, making them honorary members

of the Quantum Computing Club.

Thank you.

Who could imagine

that the club now has a Fortune 100 CEO,

a congressman,

a couple of university presidents,

a co-founder of NVIDIA,

and the board chair of RPI?

[laughs]

[applause]

[playing "Become a Mountain"]

[student] The operating temperature of the quantum chip

is 0.015 Kelvin,

which is -459 °F.

[student 2] So you see the original

stained glass windows that depict the Saints,

called the four doctors of the Western Catholic Church.

[Jay] They've got the greatest, best system in System One.

But we are building bigger systems.

We're about to see a system that's four times the size.

Have they seen systems yet?

["Become a Mountain" continues]

[Jay] You see that big one?

And I want to make that ten times the size of that.

[Osama] I think humans just have a very curious nature.

And. Yeah. Why not?

Uh, you know, be curious.

Keep learning.

I don't think we're going to solve

all the problems that we have,

but we can try.

["Become a Mountain" increases]

["Become a Mountain" continues]

The thing that's exciting about it

is that nature is strange as it can be

in this sense that the rules

are so screwy, you can't believe them.

Are we therefore reduced to this horror

that physics has got reduced?

Not to these wonderful predictions,

but to probabilities? Yes, we have.

That's the situation today.

I already see you turning off.

I can see you say you don't understand me.

You can't understand that it could be chance.

I don't like it. Tough.

I don't like it either. But that's the way it is, OK?

I don't understand it either.

I don't understand it.

It must be that nature knows

whether it's going to go up or down.

No, it is not be that nature knows.

We are not to tell nature what she's got to be.

She's clever.

She's always got better imagination than we have,

and she finds a clever way to do it

than we have thought of.

So of course you want me to write down the next one.

But I have to know more about it.

At the present time, machines are being built

to try to do experiments at higher energy.

These are very high energy.

All right, that's all.

That's all I can say about those particles.

["Become a Mountain" ends]