Quantum bits make artificial spiking neurons – Physics World

The last few years have seen rising interest in combining quantum computing and machine learning, with the hopes of discovering new capabilities and applications in both. Researchers at Aarhus University, Denmark and the University of Toronto, Canada, have now done just that by using quantum bits (qubits) to build a so-called "artificial spiking neuron" – a building block of a neural network that tries to mimic the way information flows in the brain. The researchers also showed that this new system can be used to compare and classify highly entangled quantum states – a procedure with applications in future quantum computers and other quantum technologies. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) are a way of processing information that takes more direct inspiration from biological neurons than is the case with artificial neural networks (ANNs). While ANNs are more prominent as a model in machine learning, they are only vaguely inspired by biology.