#like TECHNICALLY and MATHEMATICALLY its not out of the question in the slightest

[lleclercism]

something that kills me about this race win is the amount of people congratulating charles on winning because its helping the gap in the wdc in favor of verstappen but technically speaking charles could still win it 🤔

[script-a-world]

Can you tell me about creating my planet for someone who is dumb as a doornail with astronomy and my research keeps giving me information I do not understand. My planet has an oval orbit like Sedna and twice the size of earth and has 3 moons, sizes like Mars, Triton, and Pluto, the last one with a weird orbit like Hyperion. What do I do with the weather on different parts of the planet, the tides, and how is the moons' and sun's path seen from the planet?

Tex: The amount of detail you've given us indicates to me that you already have a good chunk of the foundational knowledge that you need to orient yourself on the topic - please don't stress about what you don't know! You don't need to be an expert on the topic, and there's a lot of wisdom in asking for help.

Orbits are tricky things, and the oval ones you're mentioning are called elliptic orbits. Juggling these many celestial bodies at once would mean being familiar with the concept of barycenters, since you're going to need two fixation points - the planet all these moons are orbiting, and the sun that the planet is orbiting. That quickly gets into a lot of math, but for now you just need to set up your reference points to better visualize things.

I can see right away that the relative sizes of your celestial bodies means that either your planet is further away from its sun than our Earth is, or your sun is proportionally larger than Earth's in order to compensate for the gravitational effect your planet has on its satellites. Jupiter is a good example of why these parameters need to be set up, in order to determine the relative size and distance of your planet's sun.

I'm going to eyeball your set-up and guess that with a planet double the size of Earth, it's possible to be either twice as far from its sun, or the sun is twice the size of ours, or the sun is half its size (which would be... interesting to see). There are, of course, exceptions when it comes to the relative sizes of planets and their satellites, of which Pluto and Charon are a notable case (Strobel’s Astronomy Notes).

Hyperion is a funny oddball. It straddles the lines of technicality between natural satellite and asteroid that's caught in someone's backyard, and I would hazard a guess that its orbit is partially caused by its porous, aggregate form. Personally I wouldn't count it as a moon, though it could be considered a proto-moon that hasn't been in your planet's orbit long enough for its gravity to shape it into a proper sphere. I don't know more details about this configuration, so it's possible that it could go crashing into one of the moons soon, if it doesn't fling itself out of orbit at the slightest provocation.

Most moons, but not all, are tidally locked with their planets, which is the phenomenon that would create an effect on ocean tides. There's not much I can say on that which isn't already covered by the link, so you'd have to come back with more specific questions on that one.

As for the weather - this isn't dependent upon satellites, but rather the rotational speed (AKA Coriolis Effect; SciJinks, Polar Satellite Meteorology and Climatology at CIMMS) and axial tilt (National Weather Service) of the planet (to a lesser degree, also solar radiation, but currently that's a more progressed topic). Wind is the driving force behind most meteorological phenomena, and acts independently of satellites like moons - however, the amount of layers in the sky also dictate what types and patterns of weather are available to your planet.

I think that wind isn’t majorly dependent upon how active the core is, despite a planet’s overall and core sizes being related to each other (PDF page 5, PDF pg 12), so the relationships between astrogeology and weather are weak at best.

If you're technologically-inclined, you could create an orrery with this GitHub code (from this previous question), which would help you visualize your moons and sun from your planet's perspective. If not, there's certainly plenty of ways to make a physical orrery, or else a solar system mobile.

Further Reading

OpenStax Astronomy textbook

PDF Introduction to Astronomy: From Darkness to Blazing Glory by Jeffrey Wright Scott

PDF Modern Astronomy: An Introduction to Astronomy by Dr Helen Johnston, The University of Sydney's School of Physics

PDF Space-Based Astronomy—An Educator Guide with Activities for Science, Mathematics, and Technology Education by NASA SpaceLink

One-Minute Astronomer’s Stargazer University courses (free and paid)

Astronomy For Beginners' Astronomy Basics

PDF Meteorology: An Educator’s Resource: for Inquiry-Based Learning for Grades 5-9 by NASA

Astronomy Portal - Wikipedia

Weather Portal - Wikipedia

PDF Physical Foundations of Cosmology by Dr Viatscheslav Mukhanov

PDF A Concise Introduction to Astrophysics – Lecture Notes for FY2450 by M. Kachelrieß

PDF Earth and the Geology of  the Terrestrial Planets, Chapter 9 by Bennett et al.

[kindlecomparedinfo]

Quantum computing’s ‘Hello World’ moment

Does quantum computing really exist? It’s fitting that for decades this field has been haunted by the fundamental uncertainty of whether it would, eventually, prove to be a wild goose chase. But Google has collapsed this nagging superposition with research not just demonstrating what’s called “quantum supremacy,” but more importantly showing that this also is only the very beginning of what quantum computers will eventually be capable of.

This is by all indications an important point in computing, but it is also very esoteric and technical in many ways. Consider, however, that in the 60s, the decision to build computers with electronic transistors must have seemed rather an esoteric point as well. Yet that was in a way the catalyst for the entire Information Age.

Most of us were not lucky enough to be involved with that decision or to understand why it was important at the time. We are lucky enough to be here now — but understanding takes a bit of explanation. The best place to start is perhaps with computing and physics pioneers Alan Turing and Richard Feynman.

‘Because nature isn’t classical, dammit’

The universal computing machine envisioned by Turing and others of his generation was brought to fruition during and after World War II, progressing from vacuum tubes to hand-built transistors to the densely packed chips we have today. With it evolved an idea of computing that essentially said: If it can be represented by numbers, we can simulate it.

That meant that cloud formation, object recognition, voice synthesis, 3D geometry, complex mathematics — all that and more could, with enough computing power, be accomplished on the standard processor-RAM-storage machines that had become the standard.

But there were exceptions. And although some were obscure things like mathematical paradoxes, it became clear as the field of quantum physics evolved that it may be one of them. It was Feynman who proposed in the early 80s that if you want to simulate a quantum system, you’ll need a quantum system to do it with.

“I’m not happy with all the analyses that go with just the classical theory, because nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical,” he concluded, in his inimitable way. Classical computers, as he deemed what everyone else just called computers, were insufficient to the task.

Richard Feynman made the right call, it turns out.

The problem? There was no such thing as a quantum computer, and no one had the slightest idea how to build one. But the gauntlet had been thrown, and it was like catnip to theorists and computer scientists, who since then have vied over the idea.

Could it be that with enough ordinary computing power, power on a scale Feynman could hardly imagine — data centers with yottabytes of storage and exaflops of processing — we can in fact simulate nature down to its smallest, spookiest levels?

Or could it be that with some types of problems you hit a wall, and that you can put every computer on Earth to a task and the progress bar will only tick forward a percentage point in a million years, if that?

And, if that’s the case, is it even possible to create a working computer that can solve that problem in a reasonable amount of time?

In order to prove Feynman correct, you would have to answer all of these questions. You’d have to show that there exists a problem that is not merely difficult for ordinary computers, but that is effectively impossible for them to solve even at incredible levels of power. And you would have to not just theorize but create a new computer that not just can but does solve that same problem.

By doing so you would not just prove a theory, you would open up an entirely new class of problem-solving, of theories that can be tested. It would be a moment when an entirely new field of computing first successfully printed “hello world” and was opened up for everyone in the world to use. And that is what the researchers at Google and NASA claim to have accomplished.

In which we skip over how it all actually works

One of the quantum computers in question. I talked with that fellow in the shorts about microwave amps and attenuators for a while.

Much has already been written on how quantum computing differs from traditional computing, and I’ll be publishing another story soon detailing Google’s approach. But some basics bear mentioning here.

Classical computers are built around transistors that, by holding or vacating a charge, signify either a 1 or a 0. By linking these transistors together into more complex formations they can represent data, or transform and combine it through logic gates like AND and NOR. With a complex language specific to digital computers that has evolved for decades, we can make them do all kinds of interesting things.

Quantum computers are actually quite similar in that they have a base unit that they perform logic on to perform various tasks. The difference is that the unit is more complex: a qubit, which represents a much more complex mathematical space than simply 0 or 1. Instead you may think of their state may be thought of as a location on a sphere, a point in 3D space. The logic is also more complicated, but still relatively basic (and helpfully still called gates): That point can be adjusted, flipped, and so on. Yet the qubit when observed is also digital, providing what amounts to either a 0 or 1 value.

By virtue of representing a value in a richer mathematical space, these qubits and manipulations thereof can perform new and interesting tasks, including some which, as Google shows, we had no ability to do before.

A quantum of contrivance

In order to accomplish the tripartite task summarized above, first the team had to find a task that classical computers found difficult but that should be relatively easy for a quantum computer to do. The problem they settled on is in a way laughably contrived: Being a quantum computer.

In a way it makes you want to just stop reading, right? Of course a quantum computer is going to be better at being itself than an ordinary computer will be. But it’s not actually that simple.

Think of a cool old piece of electronics — an Atari 800. Sure, it’s very good at being itself and running its programs and so on. But any modern computer can simulate an Atari 800 so well that it could run those programs in orders of magnitude less time. For that matter, a modern computer can be simulated by a supercomputer in much the same way.

Furthermore, there are already ways of simulating quantum computers — they were developed in tandem with real quantum hardware so performance could be compared to theory. These simulators and the hardware they simulate differ widely, and have been greatly improved in recent years as quantum computing became more than a hobby for major companies and research institutions.

This shows the “lattice” of qubits as they were connected during the experiment (colored by the amount of error they contributed, which you don’t need to know about.)

To be specific, the problem was simulating the output of a random sequence of gates and qubits in a quantum computer. Briefly stated, when a circuit of qubits does something, the result is, like other computers, a sequence of 0s and 1s. If it isn’t calculating something in particular, those numbers will be random — but crucially, they are “random” in a very specific, predictable way.

Think of a pachinko ball falling through its gauntlet of pins, holes and ramps. The path it takes is random in a way, but if you drop 10,000 balls from the exact same position into the exact same maze, there will be patterns in where they come out at the bottom — a spread of probabilities, perhaps more at the center and less at the edges. If you were to simulate that pachinko machine on a computer, you could test whether your simulation is accurate by comparing the output of 10,000 virtual drops with 10,000 real ones.

It’s the same with simulating a quantum computer, though of course rather more complex. Ultimately however the computer is doing the same thing: simulating a physical process and predicting the results. And like the pachinko simulator, its accuracy can be tested by running the real thing and comparing those results.

But just as it is easier to simulate a simple pachinko machine than a complex one, it’s easier to simulate a handful of qubits than a lot of them. After all, qubits are already complex. And when you get into questions of interference, slight errors and which direction they’d go, etc. — there are, in fact, so many factors that Feynman decided at some point you wouldn’t be able to account for them all. And at that point you would have entered the realm where only a quantum computer can do so — the realm of “quantum supremacy.”

Exponential please, and make it a double

After 1,400 words, there’s the phrase everyone else put right in the headline. Why? Because quantum supremacy may sound grand, but it’s only a small part of what was accomplished, and in fact this result in particular may not last forever as an example of having reached those lofty heights. But to continue.

Google’s setup, then, was simple. Set up randomly created circuits of qubits, both in its quantum computer and in the simulator. Start simple with a few qubits doing a handful of operational cycles and compare the time it takes to produce results.

Bear in mind that the simulator is not running on a laptop next to the fridge-sized quantum computer, but on Summit — a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab currently rated as the most powerful single processing system in the world, and not by a little. It has 2.4 million processing cores, a little under 3 petabytes of memory, and hits about 150 petaflops.

At these early stages, the simulator and the quantum computer happily agreed — the numbers they spat out, the probability spreads, were the same, over and over.

But as more qubits and more complexity got added to the system, the time the simulator took to produce its prediction increased. That’s to be expected, just like a bigger pachinko machine. At first the times for actually executing the calculation and simulating it may have been comparable — a matter of seconds or minutes. But those numbers soon grew hour by hour as they worked their way up to 54 qubits.

When it got to the point where it took the simulator five hours to verify the quantum computer’s result, Google changed its tack. Because more qubits isn’t the only way quantum computing gets more complex (and besides, they couldn’t add any more to their current hardware). Instead, they started performing more rounds of operations with a given circuit, which adds all kinds of complexity to the simulation for a lot of reasons that I couldn’t possibly explain.

For the quantum computer, doing another round of calculations takes a fraction of a second, and even multiplied by thousands of times to get the required number of runs to produce usable probability numbers, it only ended up taking the machine several extra seconds.

You know it’s real because there’s a chart. The dotted line (added by me) is the approximate path the team took, first adding qubits (x-axis) and then complexity (y-axis).

For the simulator, verifying these results took a week — a week, on the most powerful computer in the world.

At that point the team had to stop doing the actual simulator testing, since it was so time-consuming and expensive. Yet even so, no one really claimed that they had achieved “quantum supremacy.” After all, it may have taken the biggest classical computer ever created thousands of times longer, but it was still getting done.

So they cranked the dial up another couple notches. 54 qubits, doing 25 cycles, took Google’s Sycamore system 200 seconds. Extrapolating from its earlier results, the team estimated that it would take Summit 10,000 years.

What happened is what the team called double exponential increase. It turns out that adding qubits and cycles to a quantum computer adds a few microseconds or seconds every time — a linear increase. But every qubit you add to a simulated system makes that simulation exponentially more costly to run, and it’s the same story with cycles.

Imagine if you had to do whatever number of push-ups I did, squared, then squared again. If I did 1, you would do 1. If I did 2, you’d do 16. So far no problem. But by the time I get to 10, I’d be waiting for weeks while you finish your 10,000 push-ups. It’s not exactly analogous to Sycamore and Summit, since adding qubits and cycles had different and varying exponential difficulty increases, but you get the idea. At some point you can have to call it. And Google called it when the most powerful computer in the world would still be working on something when in all likelihood this planet will be a smoking ruin.

It’s worth mentioning here that this result does in a way depend on the current state of supercomputers and simulation techniques, which could very well improve. In fact IBM published a paper just before Google’s announcement suggesting that theoretically it could reduce the time necessary for the task described significantly. But it seems unlikely that they’re going to improve by multiple orders of magnitude and threaten quantum supremacy again. After all, if you add a few more qubits or cycles, it gets multiple orders of magnitude harder again. Even so, advances on the classical front are both welcome and necessary for further quantum development.

‘Sputnik didn’t do much, either’

So the quantum computer beat the classical one soundly on the most contrived, lopsided task imaginable, like pitting an apple versus an orange in a “best citrus” competition. So what?

Well, as founder of Google’s Quantum AI lab Hartmut Neven pointed out, “Sputnik didn’t do much either. It just circled the Earth and beeped.” And yet we always talk about an industry having its “Sputnik moment” — because that was when something went from theory to reality, and began the long march from reality to banality.

The ritual passing of the quantum computing core.

That seemed to be the attitude of the others on the team I talked with at Google’s quantum computing ground zero near Santa Barbara. Quantum superiority is nice, they said, but it’s what they learned in the process that mattered, by confirming that what they were doing wasn’t pointless.

Basically it’s possible that a result like theirs could be achieved whether or not quantum computing really has a future. Pointing to one of the dozens of nearly incomprehensible graphs and diagrams I was treated to that day, hardware lead and longtime quantum theorist John Martinez explained one crucial result: The quantum computer wasn’t doing anything weird and unexpected.

This is very important when doing something completely new. It was entirely possible that in the process of connecting dozens of qubits and forcing them to dance to the tune of the control systems, flipping, entangling, disengaging, and so on — well, something might happen.

Maybe it would turn out that systems with more than 14 entangled qubits in the circuit produce a large amount of interference that breaks the operation. Maybe some unknown force would cause sequential qubit photons to affect one another. Maybe sequential gates of certain types would cause the qubit to decohere and break the circuit. It’s these unknown unknowns that have caused so much doubt over whether, as asked at the beginning, quantum computing really exists as anything more than a parlor trick.

Imagine if they discovered that in digital computers, if you linked too many transistors together, they all spontaneously lost their charge and went to 0. That would put a huge limitation on what a transistor-based digital computer was capable of doing. Until now, no one knew if such a limitation existed for quantum computers.

“There’s no new physics out there that will cause this to fail. That’s a big takeaway,” said Martinez. “We see the same errors whether we have a simple circuit or complex one, meaning the errors are not dependent on computational complexity or entanglement — which means the complex quantum computing going on doesn’t have fragility to it because you’re doing a complex computation.”

They operated a quantum computer at complexities higher than ever before, and nothing weird happens. And based on their observations and tests, they found that there’s no reason to believe they can’t take this same scheme up to, say, a thousand qubits and even greater complexity.

Hello world

That is the true accomplishment of the work the research team did. They found out, in the process of achieving the rather overhyped milestone of quantum superiority, that quantum computers are something that can continue to get better and to achieve more than simply an interesting experimental results.

This was by no means a given — like everything else in the world, quantum or classical, it’s all theoretical until you test it.

It means that sometime soonish, though no one can really say when, quantum computers will be something people will use to accomplish real tasks. From here on out, it’s a matter of getting better, not proving the possibility; of writing code, not theorizing whether code can be executed.

It’s going from Feynman’s proposal that a quantum computer will be needed to using a quantum computer for whatever you need it for. It’s the “hello world” moment for quantum computing.

Feynman, by the way, would probably not be surprised. He knew he was right.

Google’s paper describing their work was published in the journal Nature. You can read it here.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8176395 https://techcrunch.com/2019/10/26/quantum-computings-hello-world-moment/ via http://www.kindlecompared.com/kindle-comparison/

[un-enfant-immature]

Quantum computing’s ‘Hello World’ moment

Does quantum computing really exist? It’s fitting that for decades this field has been haunted by the fundamental uncertainty of whether it would, eventually, prove to be a wild goose chase. But Google has collapsed this nagging superposition with research not just demonstrating what’s called “quantum supremacy,” but more importantly showing that this also is only the very beginning of what quantum computers will eventually be capable of.

This is by all indications an important point in computing, but it is also very esoteric and technical in many ways. Consider, however, that in the 60s, the decision to build computers with electronic transistors must have seemed rather an esoteric point as well. Yet that was in a way the catalyst for the entire Information Age.

Most of us were not lucky enough to be involved with that decision or to understand why it was important at the time. We are lucky enough to be here now — but understanding takes a bit of explanation. The best place to start is perhaps with computing and physics pioneers Alan Turing and Richard Feynman.

‘Because nature isn’t classical, dammit’

The universal computing machine envisioned by Turing and others of his generation was brought to fruition during and after World War II, progressing from vacuum tubes to hand-built transistors to the densely packed chips we have today. With it evolved an idea of computing that essentially said: If it can be represented by numbers, we can simulate it.

That meant that cloud formation, object recognition, voice synthesis, 3D geometry, complex mathematics — all that and more could, with enough computing power, be accomplished on the standard processor-RAM-storage machines that had become the standard.

But there were exceptions. And although some were obscure things like mathematical paradoxes, it became clear as the field of quantum physics evolved that it may be one of them. It was Feynman who proposed in the early 80s that if you want to simulate a quantum system, you’ll need a quantum system to do it with.

“I’m not happy with all the analyses that go with just the classical theory, because nature isn’t classical, dammit, and if you want to make a simulation of nature, you’d better make it quantum mechanical,” he concluded, in his inimitable way. Classical computers, as he deemed what everyone else just called computers, were insufficient to the task.

Richard Feynman made the right call, it turns out.

The problem? There was no such thing as a quantum computer, and no one had the slightest idea how to build one. But the gauntlet had been thrown, and it was like catnip to theorists and computer scientists, who since then have vied over the idea.

Could it be that with enough ordinary computing power, power on a scale Feynman could hardly imagine — data centers with yottabytes of storage and exaflops of processing — we can in fact simulate nature down to its smallest, spookiest levels?

Or could it be that with some types of problems you hit a wall, and that you can put every computer on Earth to a task and the progress bar will only tick forward a percentage point in a million years, if that?

And, if that’s the case, is it even possible to create a working computer that can solve that problem in a reasonable amount of time?

In order to prove Feynman correct, you would have to answer all of these questions. You’d have to show that there exists a problem that is not merely difficult for ordinary computers, but that is effectively impossible for them to solve even at incredible levels of power. And you would have to not just theorize but create a new computer that not just can but does solve that same problem.

By doing so you would not just prove a theory, you would open up an entirely new class of problem-solving, of theories that can be tested. It would be a moment when an entirely new field of computing first successfully printed “hello world” and was opened up for everyone in the world to use. And that is what the researchers at Google and NASA claim to have accomplished.

In which we skip over how it all actually works

One of the quantum computers in question. I talked with that fellow in the shorts about microwave amps and attenuators for a while.

Much has already been written on how quantum computing differs from traditional computing, and I’ll be publishing another story soon detailing Google’s approach. But some basics bear mentioning here.

Classical computers are built around transistors that, by holding or vacating a charge, signify either a 1 or a 0. By linking these transistors together into more complex formations they can represent data, or transform and combine it through logic gates like AND and NOR. With a complex language specific to digital computers that has evolved for decades, we can make them do all kinds of interesting things.

Quantum computers are actually quite similar in that they have a base unit that they perform logic on to perform various tasks. The difference is that the unit is more complex: a qubit, which represents a much more complex mathematical space than simply 0 or 1. Instead you may think of their state may be thought of as a location on a sphere, a point in 3D space. The logic is also more complicated, but still relatively basic (and helpfully still called gates): That point can be adjusted, flipped, and so on. Yet the qubit when observed is also digital, providing what amounts to either a 0 or 1 value.

By virtue of representing a value in a richer mathematical space, these qubits and manipulations thereof can perform new and interesting tasks, including some which, as Google shows, we had no ability to do before.

A quantum of contrivance

In order to accomplish the tripartite task summarized above, first the team had to find a task that classical computers found difficult but that should be relatively easy for a quantum computer to do. The problem they settled on is in a way laughably contrived: Being a quantum computer.

In a way it makes you want to just stop reading, right? Of course a quantum computer is going to be better at being itself than an ordinary computer will be. But it’s not actually that simple.

Think of a cool old piece of electronics — an Atari 800. Sure, it’s very good at being itself and running its programs and so on. But any modern computer can simulate an Atari 800 so well that it could run those programs in orders of magnitude less time. For that matter, a modern computer can be simulated by a supercomputer in much the same way.

Furthermore, there are already ways of simulating quantum computers — they were developed in tandem with real quantum hardware so performance could be compared to theory. These simulators and the hardware they simulate differ widely, and have been greatly improved in recent years as quantum computing became more than a hobby for major companies and research institutions.

This shows the “lattice” of qubits as they were connected during the experiment (colored by the amount of error they contributed, which you don’t need to know about.)

To be specific, the problem was simulating the output of a random sequence of gates and qubits in a quantum computer. Briefly stated, when a circuit of qubits does something, the result is, like other computers, a sequence of 0s and 1s. If it isn’t calculating something in particular, those numbers will be random — but crucially, they are “random” in a very specific, predictable way.

Think of a pachinko ball falling through its gauntlet of pins, holes and ramps. The path it takes is random in a way, but if you drop 10,000 balls from the exact same position into the exact same maze, there will be patterns in where they come out at the bottom — a spread of probabilities, perhaps more at the center and less at the edges. If you were to simulate that pachinko machine on a computer, you could test whether your simulation is accurate by comparing the output of 10,000 virtual drops with 10,000 real ones.

It’s the same with simulating a quantum computer, though of course rather more complex. Ultimately however the computer is doing the same thing: simulating a physical process and predicting the results. And like the pachinko simulator, its accuracy can be tested by running the real thing and comparing those results.

But just as it is easier to simulate a simple pachinko machine than a complex one, it’s easier to simulate a handful of qubits than a lot of them. After all, qubits are already complex. And when you get into questions of interference, slight errors and which direction they’d go, etc. — there are, in fact, so many factors that Feynman decided at some point you wouldn’t be able to account for them all. And at that point you would have entered the realm where only a quantum computer can do so — the realm of “quantum supremacy.”

Exponential please, and make it a double

After 1,400 words, there’s the phrase everyone else put right in the headline. Why? Because quantum supremacy may sound grand, but it’s only a small part of what was accomplished, and in fact this result in particular may not last forever as an example of having reached those lofty heights. But to continue.

Google’s setup, then, was simple. Set up randomly created circuits of qubits, both in its quantum computer and in the simulator. Start simple with a few qubits doing a handful of operational cycles and compare the time it takes to produce results.

Bear in mind that the simulator is not running on a laptop next to the fridge-sized quantum computer, but on Summit — a supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Lab currently rated as the most powerful single processing system in the world, and not by a little. It has 2.4 million processing cores, a little under 3 petabytes of memory, and hits about 150 petaflops.

At these early stages, the simulator and the quantum computer happily agreed — the numbers they spat out, the probability spreads, were the same, over and over.

But as more qubits and more complexity got added to the system, the time the simulator took to produce its prediction increased. That’s to be expected, just like a bigger pachinko machine. At first the times for actually executing the calculation and simulating it may have been comparable — a matter of seconds or minutes. But those numbers soon grew hour by hour as they worked their way up to 54 qubits.

When it got to the point where it took the simulator five hours to verify the quantum computer’s result, Google changed its tack. Because more qubits isn’t the only way quantum computing gets more complex (and besides, they couldn’t add any more to their current hardware). Instead, they started performing more rounds of operations with a given circuit, which adds all kinds of complexity to the simulation for a lot of reasons that I couldn’t possibly explain.

For the quantum computer, doing another round of calculations takes a fraction of a second, and even multiplied by thousands of times to get the required number of runs to produce usable probability numbers, it only ended up taking the machine several extra seconds.

You know it’s real because there’s a chart. The dotted line (added by me) is the approximate path the team took, first adding qubits (x-axis) and then complexity (y-axis).

For the simulator, verifying these results took a week — a week, on the most powerful computer in the world.

At that point the team had to stop doing the actual simulator testing, since it was so time-consuming and expensive. Yet even so, no one really claimed that they had achieved “quantum supremacy.” After all, it may have taken the biggest classical computer ever created thousands of times longer, but it was still getting done.

So they cranked the dial up another couple notches. 54 qubits, doing 25 cycles, took Google’s Sycamore system 200 seconds. Extrapolating from its earlier results, the team estimated that it would take Summit 10,000 years.

What happened is what the team called double exponential increase. It turns out that adding qubits and cycles to a quantum computer adds a few microseconds or seconds every time — a linear increase. But every qubit you add to a simulated system makes that simulation exponentially more costly to run, and it’s the same story with cycles.

Imagine if you had to do whatever number of push-ups I did, squared, then squared again. If I did 1, you would do 1. If I did 2, you’d do 16. So far no problem. But by the time I get to 10, I’d be waiting for weeks while you finish your 10,000 push-ups. It’s not exactly analogous to Sycamore and Summit, since adding qubits and cycles had different and varying exponential difficulty increases, but you get the idea. At some point you can have to call it. And Google called it when the most powerful computer in the world would still be working on something when in all likelihood this planet will be a smoking ruin.

It’s worth mentioning here that this result does in a way depend on the current state of supercomputers and simulation techniques, which could very well improve. In fact IBM published a paper just before Google’s announcement suggesting that theoretically it could reduce the time necessary for the task described significantly. But it seems unlikely that they’re going to improve by multiple orders of magnitude and threaten quantum supremacy again. After all, if you add a few more qubits or cycles, it gets multiple orders of magnitude harder again. Even so, advances on the classical front are both welcome and necessary for further quantum development.

‘Sputnik didn’t do much, either’

So the quantum computer beat the classical one soundly on the most contrived, lopsided task imaginable, like pitting an apple versus an orange in a “best citrus” competition. So what?

Well, as founder of Google’s Quantum AI lab Hartmut Neven pointed out, “Sputnik didn’t do much either. It just circled the Earth and beeped.” And yet we always talk about an industry having its “Sputnik moment” — because that was when something went from theory to reality, and began the long march from reality to banality.

The ritual passing of the quantum computing core.

That seemed to be the attitude of the others on the team I talked with at Google’s quantum computing ground zero near Santa Barbara. Quantum superiority is nice, they said, but it’s what they learned in the process that mattered, by confirming that what they were doing wasn’t pointless.

Basically it’s possible that a result like theirs could be achieved whether or not quantum computing really has a future. Pointing to one of the dozens of nearly incomprehensible graphs and diagrams I was treated to that day, hardware lead and longtime quantum theorist John Martinez explained one crucial result: The quantum computer wasn’t doing anything weird and unexpected.

This is very important when doing something completely new. It was entirely possible that in the process of connecting dozens of qubits and forcing them to dance to the tune of the control systems, flipping, entangling, disengaging, and so on — well, something might happen.

Maybe it would turn out that systems with more than 14 entangled qubits in the circuit produce a large amount of interference that breaks the operation. Maybe some unknown force would cause sequential qubit photons to affect one another. Maybe sequential gates of certain types would cause the qubit to decohere and break the circuit. It’s these unknown unknowns that have caused so much doubt over whether, as asked at the beginning, quantum computing really exists as anything more than a parlor trick.

Imagine if they discovered that in digital computers, if you linked too many transistors together, they all spontaneously lost their charge and went to 0. That would put a huge limitation on what a transistor-based digital computer was capable of doing. Until now, no one knew if such a limitation existed for quantum computers.

“There’s no new physics out there that will cause this to fail. That’s a big takeaway,” said Martinez. “We see the same errors whether we have a simple circuit or complex one, meaning the errors are not dependent on computational complexity or entanglement — which means the complex quantum computing going on doesn’t have fragility to it because you’re doing a complex computation.”

They operated a quantum computer at complexities higher than ever before, and nothing weird happens. And based on their observations and tests, they found that there’s no reason to believe they can’t take this same scheme up to, say, a thousand qubits and even greater complexity.

Hello world

That is the true accomplishment of the work the research team did. They found out, in the process of achieving the rather overhyped milestone of quantum superiority, that quantum computers are something that can continue to get better and to achieve more than simply an interesting experimental results.

This was by no means a given — like everything else in the world, quantum or classical, it’s all theoretical until you test it.

It means that sometime soonish, though no one can really say when, quantum computers will be something people will use to accomplish real tasks. From here on out, it’s a matter of getting better, not proving the possibility; of writing code, not theorizing whether code can be executed.

It’s going from Feynman’s proposal that a quantum computer will be needed to using a quantum computer for whatever you need it for. It’s the “hello world” moment for quantum computing.

Feynman, by the way, would probably not be surprised. He knew he was right.

Google’s paper describing their work was published in the journal Nature. You can read it here.

[verdigrisprowl]

Operation: SPRINGALINGADING. Part Three.

The team assembles for a Springer heist. They run through the details of the plan one more time, settle some final details, and at last, Prowl is sent ahead of the others to scout out Debris.

From here on out, none of these chat logs will be canon until we’ve finished. Until then, all our blogs are still pre-Springer Quest.

ItsyBitsySpyers 6:09 pm Soundwave stands at the entrance to the workroom and its sprawling station, trying to convince himself that letting Tarantulas see it won't be a fatal mistake. It's not as dangerous as showing them the one in his quarters, but still. This room and its contents run the majority of Soundwave's business - Dancitron and otherwise.

At least Zori is big and deadly enough he should pose a threat to anyone trying to tamper with things while Soundwave is gone.

He deactivates... most of the security measures protecting the room from strangers and pings his three co-conspirators. Time to go. Here are the coordinates. Get your afts in here. AND DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING. Tarantulas 6:18 pm Tarantulas isn't so sneaky he could tamper with Soundwave's things without Zori seeing, no, so they're safe on that front. Besides, Tarantulas is far more preoccupied with the mission at hand, considering who they're about to revive.

This time he's actually on time for the event, arriving pretty much instantaneously once the summons is sent out. And yes, he bridges inside the room instead of outside the door this time, thank goodness.

A quick extra ping to Prowl to let him know he's brought the holo pack - he's free to project whenever he's ready. Prowl 6:18 pm He's been waiting for this call.

And doing little BUT waiting for this call. He's spent the last several days since their final meeting distracting himself by reading about a little shipwreck from Earth, but in his mind part of him has always been on standby, waiting for the call.

He pings his acknowledgment to Soundwave as soon as he gets the comm, but waits until he receives notice from Tarantulas that he's arrived. And then patches into Tarantulas's holomatter projector. Tarantulas 6:19 pm Tarantulas is nervous and tense enough that he'll let the others initiate greetings if they so choose. Otherwise he's just going to start pacing. ItsyBitsySpyers 6:20 pm No greetings from Soundwave aside from a pair of distracted nods. Just fiddling with the last of some small cylinders before stuffing them all into his subspace. Prowl 6:21 pm No greetings from Prowl today. Too wound up to remember social etiquette. The anxiety/anticipation feels like static in his system. Whirl 6:21 pm It's not long before Whirl arrives. His bridge is hovering as close to the top of the room that it can, and he slides out of the blue vortex with as much caution as he can muster. As a helicopter.

As soon as the bridge is gone, he pivots on the spot and carefully lowers. From a technical standpoint, it's impressive flying, but in every other respect it looks pretty silly. As soon as he has space he transforms, landing neatly and casting a bright optic around the room. He seems much more animated than he was at the last meeting. "Let's do this shit." Prowl 6:23 pm A sharp nod, and a ping to Soundwave: visual data for him to patched into one of the screens, so those back at Dancitron can keep up with his progress. ItsyBitsySpyers 6:26 pm Soundwave picks the largest center screen and quickly gets the feed running - and stops for a second (but only a second) to admire the mathematical data spilling all over the place. Good thing he's recording this for later study. It'll let him see these things in more detail. For now, it'll let everyone else see them too. [[We are all ready?]] Tarantulas 6:27 pm Tarantulas snickers at Whirl's irreverent greeting, then rolls his shoulders. "Let's. A quick overview of the plans might not be amiss though." Whirl 6:29 pm Whirl's going to tilt his head and stare at the visual feed. He's quietly, but genuinely impressed. Prowl 6:30 pm Look at all these people who appreciate the fact that formulas, graphs, and probabilities spill all over his HUD. Tarantulas 6:30 pm Tarantulas is ALWAYS impressed by Prowl. Get with the program, people. Prowl 6:33 pm He glances at the screen long enough to confirm it's working—and consequently gets to see his HUD within his HUD within his HUD within his—before turning sharply away. "Right." He's usually the one in charge, he supposes he's the one that's going to explain the plan. ItsyBitsySpyers 6:33 pm Briefly distracted by the sudden chaining of HUDs? Oh yes. But paying attention now. Prowl 6:36 pm "Phase one is on Debris. Tarantulas is bridging me in first to scout out the location and the defenses, to neutralize Roadbuster, and to deploy the hologram behind which everyone else will bridge in to Springer's room." Prowl 6:37 pm "My progress will be monitored here," he gestures at the screen without looking at it, "and Whirl will update me on anything he recognizes from Debris or anything that's changed that I should look out for." Prowl 6:39 pm "Once everyone has bridged in, Soundwave will begin feeding Springer's life support systems and monitors false data to hide the fact that he's disappeared, and Tarantulas and Frenzy will work to unhook him as quickly as possible, while Whirl..." Prowl looks at Whirl for a moment, flummoxed, then finally finishes, "... monitors our progress." Whirl 6:41 pm "I can help with unhooking him, too." Prowl 6:43 pm Prowl stops on the verge of saying something, and looks at Whirl, considering the proposition. The last time Whirl was given any sort of control over Springer's static form, he tried to kill him. What were the odds he was going to again?

... Low enough. "Fine. All the faster." ItsyBitsySpyers 6:44 pm Good. The less time and energy spent safely holding the room down, the more he'll have for other things. Prowl 6:44 pm "Chimera will open a bridge for us to the abandoned Decepticon lab, we carry Springer through, and that begins phase two." Prowl 6:48 pm "Now that he's disconnected from his life support, from here on out, until the zero point is fixed, Springer's spark will be slowly shrinking. How fast, we won't know until we see it, but most likely not enough to be a threat. Plus, there MIGHT be functional life support equipment in the lab—I'll be looking for it once we arrive—but we can't count on the possibility. Our best bet will be to work as quickly as possible." Whirl 6:49 pm He simply nods, silently. Tarantulas 6:49 pm "I've got that covered," Tarantulas adds. Don't you worry about the science, Prowl. Prowl 6:52 pm Good. A nod. "Tarantulas will be performing the procedure to locate and seal his zero point. Frenzy, Whirl, and I will be on standby to help in whatever way Tarantulas deems necessary." That probably meant Frenzy might be ACTUALLY helping while Prowl and Whirl were sent to grab tools. "Soundwave will be patched into the base's security to ensure that no Decepticons discover their locked wing has been breached and come to investigate—but since the wing IS locked and we won't need to go through any doors, the probability that they'll discover us is 1.4%." ItsyBitsySpyers 6:55 pm Chimera slinks in as their feline self while Prowl talks. They hop up onto the chair to begin making their calculations, stopping their typing only to get an affectionate scratch under the chin from Soundwave. Prowl 6:55 pm "Once his zero point has been sealed, Tarantulas will do a quick checkup to ensure that everything is functional, and then we move on to phase three: invincibility." Prowl 6:57 pm "First, Tarantulas will augment the output of Springer's spark, so that it can handle the strain of the process. I don't have the slightest comprehension of how he's going to do that. And then—from what I can understand—we remove his limbs, kibble, and outer armor, stick him in a tub, and shower him with ununtrium." He looks at Tarantulas. "Is that about right?" Tarantulas 6:58 pm Tarantulas squints his visor in an unreadable expression. "Close enough, hyeh." Whirl 6:58 pm "What d'you mean by that, exactly? What might change, there?" Tarantulas 6:59 pm "There's propex involved, among other things. Just details and semantics, that's all." Whirl 7:01 pm Whirl stares at him for a moment longer, and then just nods slowly, flicking his optic back to Prowl. Prowl 7:03 pm Well, if everyone's satisfied. "Then we remove him, examine him, and reassemble him. Soundwave will wake him up briefly enough to ensure that everything's all right while we—" hide like the cowards we are— "conceal ourselves. Once we've ensured his safety, we sedate him, and bridge him to a secure bunker on Hydrus 5 where the Wreckers can retrieve him." "Questions?" ItsyBitsySpyers 7:03 pm [[None.]] Tarantulas 7:04 pm Not the ending Tarantulas wants, but he can't argue with it at this point. He shakes his helm no. Whirl 7:04 pm Whirl looks down at the floor while he spends a moment gathering his thoughts. "So... what's our backup plan if we do get caught? Do we fight, or do we run? CAN we even run, if we're in the middle of all that?" Tarantulas 7:06 pm "Medically, it depends on where we are in the process of operations. It's - possible, though." Prowl 7:06 pm "It depends where we are in the process. There will be very few moments—most of them only a few seconds long—where Springer will be in any danger if we have to immediately drop what we're doing and relocate. Since we can bridge and the Wreckers and Decepticons can't, relocating is the safest bet. Prowl 7:07 pm "Most dangerous, I expect, will be applying the ununtrium, since it has to be done all at once and can't be interrupted without ruining the end result; but if the Decepticons have shown no signs of detecting us by then, they're unlikely to suddenly start. And if they HAVE begun to suspect that they have intruders, Soundwave will have noticed and alerted us before we get that far." Tarantulas 7:08 pm A nod. That's the only part Tarantulas would be worried about. Prowl 7:08 pm Ah, good. Prowl had been about to ask if Tarantulas agreed with his analysis; apparently so. ItsyBitsySpyers 7:09 pm Small nod. He will do his best to ensure that they need neither fight nor run. Failure is not something to which he is accustomed, and fighting risks lives and leaves evidence. [[If there is a problem, the three of you are to leave first.]] Whirl 7:09 pm He nods slowly. "So, odds of us having to make a stand are very, very low. In the hilariously unlikely event we DO have to fight, I can hold them off. " Prowl 7:09 pm "You mean Springer, Tarantulas, and Whirl." Surely Prowl wasn't included in the three. Prowl was fake. ItsyBitsySpyers 7:10 pm [[The four of you, then. You will deactivate your avatar.]] [[And so noted, Whirl.]] Prowl 7:10 pm "Negative. We gain nothing by having me leave and we lose any help I can offer. ItsyBitsySpyers 7:11 pm [[Then be something that is not you. He knows Bonecrusher added a Predacon.]] Or something like one. Whirl 7:11 pm "I'll go second-last, if it comes to it. With Prowl being the last one. I'll be most useful fighting every second I can fight." Tarantulas 7:12 pm "Mm. Then I'll prioritize Springer." Prowl 7:12 pm He frowns. "I'd be useless in a fight as a Predacon. I'll make my avatar camouflage with the background—without my paint colors, I look identical to a thousand other mechs with my frame." ItsyBitsySpyers 7:13 pm [[Very well.]] Soundwave nods to Tarantulas and Whirl. Their remarks are also noted. Tarantulas 7:13 pm "...We're to bridge to Hydrus 5 in the case of an emergency, I'm assuming?" Prowl 7:15 pm "I recommend against it—that would put us in range of panicking Wreckers while they're wondering who took their leader. I thought we'd come back here. If not, then one of your labs—or I could provide one of a myriad abandoned Autobot bases." Whirl 7:16 pm "As long as you ping me coordinates before you vanish, I can bridge on the fly." ItsyBitsySpyers 7:16 pm [[Hold.]] Shakes his helm no. [[If we must return here, we do not return to Dancitron itself. We will be harder to find in New Praxus.]] Prowl 7:17 pm "You have a secure place we can go in New Praxus?" ItsyBitsySpyers 7:17 pm Huffing laughter.

[[He has many secure places on this planet. Yes.]] Prowl 7:18 pm "Risk of nearby mechs getting caught in the crossfire if we bridge there?" ItsyBitsySpyers 7:21 pm [[If they follow us through, none, unless the fighting spills into the street. If they simply follow to the settlement itself and do not know where we are hiding, little to none expected. New Praxus' population is primarily Autobot, and there are several skilled enforcers and Wreckers present - Prowl and Whirl's alternates included. A rampage would not last long.]] Whirl 7:21 pm He does perk up curiously at the mention of his alternate, but doesn't interrupt. Prowl 7:22 pm "... Your war is under an ongoing ceasefire, is it not? A sudden unexplained assault by Decepticon forces could jeopardize your peace." ItsyBitsySpyers 7:22 pm [[Ah. Decepticon forces. He thought you were referring to the Wreckers.]] [[In that case, to the Pits. The Predacons will not take kindly to intruders.]] Prowl 7:23 pm "We're at risk of attack by both the Wreckers AND the Decepticons." Tarantulas 7:23 pm Tarantulas is getting a little impatient. "If it's going to be this much of a fuss, I'd really recommend my old lab on Cybertron." Prowl 7:23 pm "... To the Predacons, won't WE be intruders?" ItsyBitsySpyers 7:24 pm [[WE will be below and have a guide. THEY will not. But, if it pleases you more, Tarantulas' lab will do.]] Tarantulas 7:25 pm A pause. "....And if it comes down to it, I'll accept moving to the Tor." Whirl 7:25 pm "What's the Tor?" Prowl 7:26 pm Well, if they were going to be below, why would the Decepticons not also be below instead of on the Predacons' level? "The Decepticons and Wreckers lack the ability to bridge after us, much less to figure out where our bridges went. The only risk, slight as it is, is of them FOLLOWING us through the bridge—which would put them in the exact same location as us, not merely the general vicinity." Tarantulas 7:26 pm "The Tor is my *actual* lab." That's all Whirl needs to know. ItsyBitsySpyers 7:26 pm That was why he mentioned himself as guide. He knows how to get others to the surface without going up there or being seen himself. But, Tarantulas' idea seems to be more suitable, so he waves a hand. Prowl 7:26 pm "Under these circumstances, bridging into a populated zone and hoping they lose track of us isn't a viable strategy." Whirl 7:28 pm For now, he doesn't challenge the explanation. Tarantulas 7:29 pm "Just - the lab ruins, then," Tarantulas insists. "I couldn't care less about the location if something happens." Prowl 7:29 pm ... That stings a little to hear. Ignore it. Prowl nods. "Any other questions?" Tarantulas 7:30 pm It's only a half-truth, if that helps anything, Prowl. ItsyBitsySpyers 7:30 pm [[None.]] Whirl 7:30 pm Once again, Whirl takes a moment to think things over. "I think I'm good," he finally declares. Prowl 7:31 pm Nod. "Then let's begin." Tarantulas 7:32 pm A hum. "...Soundwave, would you like to be in charge of opening a secure collective commlink for the duration of the operation?" "In case of - well. Plenty of situations, really." ItsyBitsySpyers 7:34 pm [[Done.]] Tarantulas 7:34 pm "Much appreciated." Whirl 7:35 pm "All right. We've got a plan and a party line." Whirl steps up to the display showing Prowl's video feed and begins to set his claws down on the console, but thinks the better of it. "You ready, Prowl?" Prowl 7:35 pm "Once I get the holomatter projector and the sedative." ItsyBitsySpyers 7:36 pm Frenzy's arm unfolds and pokes out of Soundwave's arm to pass it over. It's kind of weird-looking. Just roll with it. Whirl 7:36 pm A simple nod. Whirl returns his bright optic to the screen, waiting. He's very evidently eager to begin. Tarantulas 7:37 pm As soon as Prowl's got the sedative, Tarantulas is offering the tiny backpack-esque holomatter projector that Prowl's currently using. Prowl 7:38 pm ... Now Prowl wonders if the Constructicons can do that. He takes the sedative and sets it into his right thigh holster. Then the projector in his left. "Ready." Tarantulas 7:40 pm Nervously Tarantulas takes mental inventory of his subspace and equipment, but there's really not much he can to do be any more ready at this point. "Similarly prepared." ItsyBitsySpyers 7:41 pm It's been far too long since he had the chance to amuse himself in this manner. A final bit of humor before the action begins, then.

[[Prowl, Tarantulas, Whirl, eject. Commence Operation: Spring Springer.]] Whirl 7:42 pm You get a soft, simulated snort in return. Prowl 7:42 pm And a blank stare. Please hold while he boots up his humor subroutines. Tarantulas 7:43 pm Tarantulas is torn between being offended and producing a snort just like Whirl's, so he simply shakes his helm and rubs his upper optics. Prowl 7:44 pm Wait for it... ItsyBitsySpyers 7:44 pm Soundwave tilts his helm. Did he break Prowl? Prowl 7:44 pm "... Pff." Tarantulas 7:45 pm OK, that gets a snicker from Tarantulas. ItsyBitsySpyers 7:45 pm There it is. Good. A forward motion with his hand now. Get on your way before it gets much later. Tarantulas 7:46 pm "Very well. A temporary moratorium on puns for the duration of the operation though, if you will." ItsyBitsySpyers 7:46 pm Through Soundwave's speakers: //No promises, legs.// Whirl 7:46 pm "I'm going to actively go out of my way to make 'em, now." Tarantulas gets a cheeky glance before Whirl goes back to staring at the screen. Prowl 7:47 pm "No puns in moments where the ambiguity in speech could potentially cause a moment of confusion capable of distracting or endangering anyone." He shrinks his avatar as far as it can go without crushing the sedative dispenser in his holster. Tarantulas 7:47 pm "Yes, that." Tarantulas squints off in Whirl's direction before moving on. Whirl 7:48 pm "Of course." Tarantulas 7:49 pm Alright, here comes the first bridge of the operation, perfectly Prowl-sized and ready for him to trot on through. The location on the other side: Debris. Prowl 7:50 pm "And if anyone DOES make an inappropriately timed joke," Prowl threatens, "he will be severely pun-ished." And he trots through the bridge before he can receive his just retaliation. ItsyBitsySpyers 7:50 pm Rumble squawks a loud HA at Prowl's back. Tarantulas 7:50 pm "Ghh!" Tarantulas fluffs up briefly. Prowl, how could you betray him so? Whirl 7:52 pm You get one last snort from Whirl. Well done, Prowl.

[edwardpotts]

Alexa Skill Development: A Kick-starter Guide

Over the past decade, voice assistants have progressively entered our lives. Names like Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana will surely ring a bell. But it was way before these names that the concept of a voice assistant was brought to light.

As far as back in 1962, IBM launched the first ever voice assistant, named Shoebox. If you hadn’t guessed it, its size went by its name. It could do the mathematical functions and recognize digits 0-9 and 16 spoken words. Then came Harpy with a vocabulary of a three-year-old, it could recognize 1,011 words.

All of these initials innovations had paved a way for what was to come next. Apple, Amazon, Google, and other giants got their best brains on this, and the result was for the world to see!

Fast forwarding to today, “Hey Siri”, “Alexa!”, “Okay Google” are commonly known.

But out of all these, Alexa stands out for the masses. Being available on 100Mn devices, it has become the talk of the industry. And it isn’t just the Talking Tom with a speaker, it actually does your chores for you, and sometimes gets you like no one else.

Technically speaking, it uses AccuWeather to provide weather reports and news with a plethora of sources such as NPR, ESPN and local radio stations.

It understands users’ needs for the beats and streams all of the rock, pop, and midnight melodies from the owner’s Amazon Music account, and offers built-in support for Spotify and Pandora accounts. It can manage the alarms and to-do lists in the way you want and also make important calls for you.

All these tasks Alexa does is through its built-in capabilities called “Skills”. Users can teach and inculcate new skills in Alexa using the Alexa Skills Kit, which can then be accessed by making requests or asking questions. You can create smart home skills, music skills, video skills, flash briefing skills, and custom skills as well.  

It is a comprehensive device operating on the latest technology and does everything that you could expect from a voice assistant at the most.

In this guide, we’ll look at how to create custom skills on Alexa, but before that,

“Alexa, what all should I know before building an Alexa-skill?”

  The common (obvious) prerequisite to building any type of skill is an account on the Developer Console, which would be used to create the configuration for your skill. The configuration would require the information about the skill, such as the name of the skill, the type of interaction model, the content feed or endpoint, and other information. This configuration is used to determine the user requests that should be sent to the Alexa service for your skill.

Tools to build a Custom Skill:

You will need an internet-accessible endpoint to host the cloud-based service, Amazon Web Services(AWS) account, and Amazon developer account to use AWS Lambda, appropriate developer environment, and an Alexa-enabled device for testing.

Tools to build a Smart-Home Skill:

You would need an account with AWS, appropriate developer environment for your preferred programming language. You can use Node.js, Python, Java, C#, or Go to author a Lambda function. For testing, you must have an Alexa-enabled device.

Tools to build a Video Skill:

Building a Video Skill would require a cloud-enabled video service provider with a public API or access to the cloud-based service, an account with AWS, an Alexa-enabled device, and an appropriate developer environment for coding.

Tools to build a Flash-Briefing skill:

You will need a content feed that would be accessible via the Internet, using RSS or JSON, which would refresh with the new content.

Tools to build a Music skill:

For a music skill, you need to have an Amazon developer account, an Alexa-enabled device registered to it, an AWS account, a music service to stream music and a cloud API to control it.

“Alexa, how do I make you work?”

  Alexa could be requested for telling the horoscope in two ways, one is,

Alexa, ask Horoscopes Today for the horoscope for Pisces.” where the sample utterances are matched with the invocation, the other is:

“Alexa, what is my horoscope?”, where an Alexa custom skill is indirectly invoked.

It is all a simple play of intents and utterances, your sample utterances should match the invocations you use to ask questions or request Alexa. The invocation name is combined with a command, action or question which further sends an “IntentRequest” with the intent corresponding the user’s requests. The command, action, or question in your invocation phrase is defined in the sample utterances and mapped to the intents.

Times may come when the users would want Alexa to just get whatever they are saying, to ease the exasperation that may result, provide a plethora of sample utterances written in various forms.

Also, who would not want to get their personalized playlist listed beside every mood that a day could encounter. Alexa can stream music and media as you ask it to. Once the Alexa device is registered to the user’s Amazon account, they can request any track from their fully-accessible Amazon Music Library.

“Alexa, what are your Technical Aspects?”

  What are the technicalities to keep in mind?

Now, there should be no ambiguity in the answer to this question. The job here is to create a cloud-based service to handle the request for the skills and host it in the cloud.

To build a custom skill, AWS Lambda function is used. An alternative to this is writing a web service (in any language), in which case the web service would respond to the request sent by Alexa.

An Interaction Model is defined when creating a custom skill. It is used by Alexa to fetch the words from the voice and translate them into a request, which is then sent to a particular skill.

The other skill types have their APIs which provide a built-in interaction model.

“Alexa, how do I build a Skill?”

  The skill-building process is organized on the Developer Console in a systematic way from creating a skill on the Build page to testing and analyzing it.

Building a Skill:

On the Build Page of the Developer Console, perform the setup and configuration of the skill. Specify the corresponding interaction model and the endpoints for the service. All these options are easily available on the Developer Console.

However, it depends on the model of the skill that what specific options should be used here. For a custom model, intents and sample utterances are created. For pre-built smart home models, an endpoint is specified and account linking configuration is performed.

Testing a Skill:

A skill could be tested in multiple ways. Utterance Profiler is used to test the custom interaction model.

On the Test page of the Developer Console, there is a simulator which gives access to the Alexa Skills Kit features, and it is used for testing the skills. Another option is to test using an Alexa-enabled device.

The skill can also be tested from command-line using ASK CLI commands.

Or else, Skill management API provides the skill testing features for the same.

Previewing a Skill:

The Distribution page on the Developer Console is used to determine the availability of the skill and have a glance at how it would appear when viewed in the Skill Store.

The metadata used here is language-specific. The details are required to be filled in each language supported by the skill. This data would then be displayed on the skill detail page accessible in the skill store.

Verifying a Skill:

On the Certification page, verify that your skill is all ready and submit it for the certification process. The Publication status of the skill will be displayed on the Status column of the Developer Console.

Once the skill is published, the publication status changes to live. Here, the skill can also be hidden or removed.

If there are any certification failures or issues, then they are fixed for successful validation and certification.

Analysing a Skill:

The Analytics page on the Developer Console is used to view the usage metrics for a skill. This dashboard depicts detailed information about how the customers are using the skill.

The present demand of the Voice Assistants has made it clear that they are changing the lifestyle of the people for good. It has been analyzed that the people who do not own a smart voice assistant desire to purchase one.

It is anticipated that the voice assistants would be made so smart that on your slightest whisper of “Alexa, I’m hungry”, it will automatically order your most favored cuisine.

AI has the capabilities that will help the smart speakers to think and learn by themselves without being programmed for every other intent. Artificial Intelligence is going to be the market leader and Voice Assistants, being a product of it, and always learning and improving, aren’t going anywhere. The Voice Assistants are here to grow and stay.

Now, if you’re looking for well-built Alexa skills for your company, make sure you hire a professional team and avoid any last-minute hassles. It’ll not only help you improve your customer services, but also help you save your time while placing you ahead of your competitors.

The post Alexa Skill Development: A Kick-starter Guide appeared first on Affle Enterprise Blog.

Alexa Skill Development: A Kick-starter Guide published first on https://spyadvice.tumblr.com/