7 NEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades
Facebook’s bet on the future of VR isn’t really going to plan. The social media giant has already put billions into the VR biz and when it bought VR headset maker Oculus five years ago for £1.5 billion, it believed that VR hardware was the future. But the technology is taking longer to catch on with the general public, something Zuckerberg spoke about when he responded to a question on the slow uptake of VR during Facebook’s Q3 earnings call. “This is taking a bit longer than we thought. And I’m still optimistic. I think that the long-term vision and the reasons why I thought this was going to be important and big are unchanged... And because of that, I think that we’re still going to get there,” said Zuckerberg. In May, Facebook launched its VR headset, the Oculus Quest. It retails for £499 and primarily functions as a VR gaming platform. It will also grant users access to Facebook Horizon, a new ‘social VR world’ that launches in 2020. Zuckerberg insisted during the earnings call that Quest is “growing and doing quite well”. FACEBOOK AND VR
RACE FOR ‘QUANTUM SUPREMACY’
Google has declared that it has achieved ‘quantum supremacy’ – the moment that a sophisticated quantum computer performed a task that stumped even the most powerful standard computer in the world – but this has been widely disputed in the quantum community. Google published its claim in the journal Nature after an earlier report on the work was leaked to Nasa in September. The paper describes how its research team built a superconducting quantum processor named Sycamore that uses the weirdness of quantum physics to solve problems. To demonstrate, the scientists set it to the task of checking the randomness of a sequence of numbers. What it rattled through in three minutes and 20 seconds would keep IBM’s Summit – the world’s most powerful supercomputer – busy for 10,000 years, or so they claim.
IBM argued that its supercomputer held at Oak Ridge in Tennessee could solve the randomness problem in 2.5 days, perhaps less, depending on the programming. They add that because ‘quantum supremacy’ requires a quantum computer to solve a problem that is beyond a classical computer, Google’s claim doesn’t hold up. IBM also hit out at Google for irresponsible use of the term, referring to an article in which Professor John Preskill repeated concerns in the quantum community that the term “exacerbates the already overhyped reporting on the status of quantum technology” and that “supremacy, through its association with white supremacy, evokes a repugnant political stance”. However, IBM did credit Google for an “excellent demonstration of progress” in the field and
acknowledged the challenge of working on quantum systems.
feedzinesocial feedmagazine.tv
Powered by FlippingBook