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takyon [soylentnews.org] writes:

A D-Wave computer has been used for a machine learning vision task [sciencemag.org] (treat references in the article to "quantum computer" or "qubits" with a qubit of salt):

Scientists have trained a quantum computer to recognize trees. That may not seem like a big deal, but the result means that researchers are a step closer to using such computers for complicated machine learning problems like pattern recognition and computer vision. The team used a D-Wave [sciencemag.org] 2X computer, an advanced model from the Burnaby, Canada–based company that created the world's first quantum computer in 2007.

[...] In the new study, physicist Edward Boyda of St. Mary's College of California in Moraga and colleagues fed hundreds of NASA satellite images of California into the D-Wave 2X processor, which contains 1152 qubits. The researchers asked the computer to consider dozens of features—hue, saturation, even light reflectance—to determine whether clumps of pixels were trees as opposed to roads, buildings, or rivers. They then told the computer whether its classifications were right or wrong so that the computer could learn from its mistakes, tweaking the formula it uses to determine whether something is a tree. "Classification is a tricky problem; there are short trees, tall trees, trees next to each other, next to buildings—all sorts of combinations," says team member Ramakrishna Nemani, an earth scientist at NASA's Advanced Supercomputer Division in Mountain View, California.

After it was trained, the D-Wave was 90% accurate in recognizing trees [plos.org] [open, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0172505] [DX [doi.org]] in aerial photographs of Mill Valley, California, the team reports in PLOS ONE. It was only slightly more accurate than a conventional computer would have been at the same problem. But the results demonstrate how scientists can program quantum computers to "look" at and analyze images, and opens up the possibility of using them to solve other complex problems that require heavy data crunching.

The 1,152 "qubit" system is not D-Wave's latest product [soylentnews.org].

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