The quantum revolution: First port of call

This is an audio transcript of the Tech Tonic podcast episode: ‘The quantum revolution: First port of call’

Madhumita Murgia
Hi, my name is Madhumita Murgia and I’m one of the presenters of Tech Tonic. We’re looking for some feedback from our listeners about the show. So if you have a second, please fill out our brief listener survey, which you can find at FT.com/techtonicsurvey. 

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Josh Gabert-Doyon
Straight on, yeah, straight on.

John Thornhill
Back in February, Tech Tonic producer Josh and I visited the Port of Los Angeles. Now you might be wondering, why are they visiting a port for a series about quantum computing? Well, just hang in there.

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In half a mile, turn right.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Do you wanna describe what we’re looking at going over this bridge?

John Thornhill
Well, we’re just going over the Vincent Thomas Bridge into the most extraordinarily large port I’ve ever seen. Masses of multicoloured containers on our left. And we’re heading to meet some truckers.

The port itself is a labyrinth of off ramps and overpasses. As we pulled in, we got a good view of the dangling cranes, massive cargo ships and just mountains upon mountains of shipping containers.

Josh Gabert-Doyon
Look at this. That’s as far as you can see, that’s just boxes.

John Thornhill
Yeah. I mean, if you lose one, (chuckle) how would you even find it.

We parked on a back road in the port, had a bite to eat at a taco stand and spoke to a couple of truck drivers who were taking their lunch break.

Can you tell us your name?

Arturo Reyes
Oh, my name is Arturo Reyes.

John Thornhill
These truckers play a crucial role at the port, picking up containers shipped in from around the world and starting their journey across the country.

Can you describe your typical day?

Arturo Reyes
Well, yeah. I live in ah, north of Bakersfield. It’s Delano, it’s a small town, and I wake up at five in the morning. I get that empty container, load it, and I come back over here about 12. I’ll get home at seven, eight. But ah . . . 

John Thornhill
It’s a long day.

Arturo Reyes
Yeah, it’s a long day. It’s like between 12 and 14 hours. It depends on how the port is working.

John Thornhill
The port of LA is incredibly busy. Tens of thousands of containers come in and out of the port complex every single day. And that means that truck drivers often find themselves waiting in long lines.

Arturo Reyes
Sometimes we make big lines, like two, three hours. You have to keep your mind like, like the prisoners. You have to keep your minds busy on something else. So, yeah, you don’t get bored or you get stressed.

John Thornhill
So the truckers have to find creative ways to fill their time.

What do you do when you’re waiting?

Unidentified speaker
Sometimes I read a book, The Bible. I’m a Jehovah Witness.

John Thornhill
What do you do while you’re waiting?

Unidentified speaker
For me, I usually, I put an audio book on, or if it’s a long period, then I’ll probably take a nap.

John Thornhill
And what do you do when you’re waiting?

Unidentified speaker
Ah, watching my videos.

Unidentified speaker
Oh, ah. Sometimes I exercise.

John Thornhill
What kind of exercise do you do?

Unidentified speaker
Oh, any, it’s boxing, jumping. Yeah, you have to. You have to keep your mind busy.

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John Thornhill
In theory, ports like this one have a simple task: to get crates of goods off ships and on to trucks as quickly and efficiently as possible. But in practice, things can get complicated really quickly. It’s a huge logistical operation with loads of moving parts, ships waiting to dock, trucks arriving to collect their containers, and cranes moving around ever growing piles of cargo. The port is one massive logistical nightmare, and this is where quantum computers come in because logistical nightmares with lots of moving parts are exactly the kinds of problems that quantum computers are supposed to be able to solve. And here in Los Angeles, they’re actually using a quantum computer to put that theory into practice.

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This is Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m John Thornhill.

Madhumita Murgia
And I’m Madhumita Murgia. A new type of computer is being built that can do things no other computer can do. Quantum computers harness the mysteries of quantum physics, and people building them say they’re going to change the world. So far, we’ve had a lot of speculation about what quantum computers might do in the future. But there are people trying to apply quantum computing’s power to real-world problems right now.

John Thornhill
I’m at the Port of Los Angeles where people say that quantum computers are already having a big impact. But are they really?

Madhumita Murgia
In this episode: Quantum’s first port of call.

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John Thornhill
The LA port complex is one of the busiest ports in the world and the largest in the US. 

Matt Schrap
The primary trade partner is China, so many are coming from Asia, but we do have containers coming from Australia, south Pacific.

John Thornhill
Matt Schrap is head of the Harbor Trucking Association, an industry group representing truck drivers and trucking companies. He says that the amount of traffic coming in and out of this port actually tells you a lot about how trade is flowing around the world.

Matt Schrap
Some are being routed here from Europe, South America, Mexico, et cetera. So it really is a worldwide gateway.

John Thornhill
And what kind of goods mostly come through here? Is it consumer goods?

Matt Schrap
Mostly consumer goods, yes. There’s construction material. There’s heavy machinery, there’s liquid chemicals, there’s bulk material. But for the most part, it’s driven on an import level by the consumer goods.

John Thornhill
The port is crucial to the healthy functioning of the US economy. But according to the World Bank’s rankings, it also has the dubious title of being the least efficient port on the planet. The sheer volume of cargo moving through this port every day makes it fiendishly hard to deal with. And the system for getting it off the ships and on to the trucks is really complicated.

Matt Schrap
So you can see we have two ships right now, it looks like possibly three that are here.

John Thornhill
Matt was pointing out towards the shimmering Pacific Ocean.

Matt Schrap
That is where ships will pull up to that berth and then they’ll be serviced by those ship to shore cranes.

John Thornhill
Each cargo ship is packed with containers which are taken off the ship by that first crane.

Matt Schrap
It’s then moved to a different part of the yard. Place it into a row and then the RTG will come along, pick it up vertically, and then drop it on to a waiting truck.

John Thornhill
RTGs or rubber tyred gantries are enormous cranes that move boxes around the port. They move the container from the pile where it’s been dropped on to other piles in different parts of the yard. At the same time that all of this is happening there are the truckers.

Matt Schrap
So they show up to work in the morning, and dispatch says you need to go to Pier 300. Your appointment is at 9am. Then you have usually have a window on either end of it. That’s varies by terminal.

John Thornhill
Truckers get a time slot telling them when their container will be off the ship and ready to pick up.

Matt Schrap
So he shows up at one of them and effectively gets in the queue to get inside the gate. There will be a line of trucks all the way down. That’s Navy Way right there behind you, coming out of that little jetty-looking thing all the way down to the port.

John Thornhill
The truck will then go to the pile with their container, which might be buried under a bunch of other containers and wait for the crane to load it on. Then the truck drops it off in a warehouse and the whole process starts all over again. It’s a logistic jigsaw puzzle. Cranes have to be matched to trucks. Trucks have to be matched to containers. And so on and so on. The complexity of the operations means there’s a lot of waiting about.

Matt Schrap
So for a driver, nobody wants to sit around waiting. If you’re a driver, you want to drive. That windshield time behind the wheel is something that you cherish.

John Thornhill
Making this whole process of getting shipping containers off boats and on to trucks, and maybe as a result, giving truckers a bit more time on the road and a bit less time waiting around in long queues, well, this is the kind of tricky problem that technologists say quantum computers are perfect for. Because of the way they work, quantum computers can assess all the possible solutions to a problem and find the best one almost straight away. So with a port, you might have to decide the order to bring in the boats, how you unload the crates, where the cranes put the crates into piles, and which truck goes where. A quantum computer can, in theory, take all the millions of possible ordering of ships, cranes and trucks and zero in on the right most efficient way to do things. Now, no one has actually built a full working universal quantum computer yet. There aren’t any quantum computers out there that we know of that can do the amazing things that they’re supposed to do, like break encryption on the internet or crack the secrets of drug development. But there are companies that say, using the right approach, existing quantum computers can be used today to solve specific types of problems.

Ed Heinbockel
At the end of the day, it’s quite simply get the containers off the ships as quickly as possible and get them out of the pier as quickly as possible, touching at the minimum number of times. And you do that, everybody’s happy.

John Thornhill
That’s Ed Heinbockel.

Ed Heinbockel
I’m CEO and co-founder of SavantX.

John Thornhill
SavantX is an automation company that worked with the port to try to make it run more efficiently. Ed reckoned a powerful quantum computer could speed up the container loading, so they decided to focus on two main goals.

Ed Heinbockel
We wanna minimise the time that the truck is waiting to be serviced and we want to minimise the total distance travelled by a crane.

John Thornhill
The problem was that the cranes that put containers on trucks were loading the first truck that arrived, often travelling unnecessary distances up and down the port, which made the whole process much slower overall.

Ed Heinbockel
You don’t wanna have it going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth as it tries to move down a row and service the trucks. Instead, it should just keep moving, always in one direction.

John Thornhill
So Ed and his team figured that they could optimise the crane movements so that it wouldn’t just pick the container for the first truck that arrived, but would choose the most efficient order to load the containers. The hope is that by finding a smarter way to run the crane with quantum computing, the truckers will end up waiting less. All of the calculations were run through a quantum computer that was actually accessed remotely, a quantum computer built by a company called D-Wave.

Ed Heinbockel
We hit the D-Wave every 15 seconds. There are 12 rows, and by looking at that and hitting the D-Wave with frequency, we can make sure that those containers that are the highest value to the pier to be moved are being moved and within a, within a timespan that the truckers will accept and keep them happy.

John Thornhill
The D-Wave computer takes in all the information about the container, how far away it is, how deep in the stack of other containers it is, and how much the port values getting it out of the yard at high speed. And it spits out instructions to follow on the ground. But is there any evidence that a quantum computer has actually changed anything in practice since it was introduced at the port?

Ed Heinbockel
I think average wait times were two, approaching three hours for trucks. With a number of initiatives to include quantum optimisation, we’ve got this wait times down to under an hour, which was the target.

John Thornhill
So SavantX has been able to use the quantum computer to speed up operations at the port, figuring out the best way to get a crane to move a container. The complexity of these operations and the number of different variables at play is just something a classical computer can’t do very well.

I mean, assigning trucks to cranes sounds like a classic and a big data problem. Why are classical computers not able to to deal with that? And what is it specifically about quantum computing that makes it more efficient?

Ed Heinbockel
Classically, it gets complicated. If we had to do this on a classical, you could do it, but it would be very costly. And the D-Wave to run it and we get better results is a very small fraction of what it would cost. So we can get down to a great deal of granularity with quantum that you could never do feasibly with classical.

John Thornhill
This is a quantum application that’s actually in use as we speak. It suggests that even if quantum computers can’t currently tackle big computing challenges, they may be useful in optimising some real-world logistics in a big way. But after the break, are the quantum systems in use today really all they’re cracked up to be?

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Los Angeles is the home of glitz, glamour and the least efficient port in the world. And at that container port, a company called SavantX is trying to speed up operations with the help of quantum computing. The quantum systems they use are run by a company called D-Wave, who have built a very particular kind of quantum computer.

Alan Baratz
We are not talking about something that will become available in the future. We are talking about technology systems and services that are available for our customers’ use today.

John Thornhill
This is Alan Baratz, the head of D-Wave Systems, a quantum company based in Canada.

Alan Baratz
We’re the first and only commercial quantum computing company, and the reason why we are currently the only commercial quantum computing company is that we selected a very different approach to quantum computing.

John Thornhill
D-Wave’s computers don’t do everything that a quantum computer is supposed to be able to do. They do one thing and one thing only: solve optimisation problems. And Alan says optimisation problems are everywhere.

Alan Baratz
These are problems like employee scheduling or cargo container loading and unloading or protein folding. Frankly, most of the important hard problems that businesses need to solve are optimisation problems. So these are the things that make us quite different from everybody else in the quantum industry.

John Thornhill
Optimisation is an application that quantum computer researchers have been talking about for years. And there’s one category of optimisation problems that is so complex and requires so much calculation time that only a quantum computer really has a shot.

Alan Baratz
It’s known as an exponentially hard or an NP-hard optimisation problem.

John Thornhill
You might be familiar with one classic NP-hard problem: the travelling salesman. (Sound of car engine starting)

Imagine a travelling salesman, a door to door vacuum seller maybe, who needs to find the best route to visit a certain number of towns on his patch. He doesn’t want to travel unnecessarily, zigzagging back and forth between towns. But there are many possible routes to get this travelling vacuum seller between the different towns. It’s very challenging for a classical computer to work through all these different routes and figure out which one is the most efficient. But Alan says that is exactly the kind of problem that D-Wave can solve. (Doorbell)

Alan Baratz
We can solve the travelling salesman problem and we do for customers.

John Thornhill
But D-Wave’s computers have limits. For one, their computer doesn’t find the best or the optimal solution to get the travelling salesman from town to town. It just finds a solution that D-Wave says is better than a classical computer. But Alan says that D-Wave’s type of quantum computer has allowed them to have meaningful commercial applications far beyond other tech companies. That comes down to the two major varieties of quantum computers that are currently being built.

Alan Baratz
There is annealing and there is gate model. We decided to start with annealing. Everybody else in the industry decided to start with gate model. We selected annealing because it’s a much easier technology to work with. It’s easier to scale. That’s why we’re currently at 5,000 qubits when everybody else is at about a hundred qubits. And annealing is extremely good at solving optimisation problems.

John Thornhill
An annealing computer can’t do all the problems that a gate model can. Alan readily admits that D-Wave won’t be able to run Shor’s algorithm for cracking RSA or model quantum chemistry, for example, which we mentioned earlier in the series. It just does one problem: optimisation. And we should say D-Wave is controversial. Many quantum computer researchers are sceptical of what they do. Critics of D-Wave as optimisation approach really frustrate Alan. His explanation? Well, they’re just jealous.

Alan Baratz
I’ll say envy in the following sense. D-Wave was the only company in the world that decided to start with annealing quantum computers. Everybody else who started it decided to start with gate. And that’s turned out to be a really valuable decision for D-Wave.

John Thornhill
Alan sees the whole world as being made up of NP-hard problems, just waiting to be solved by a D-Wave solution. But all that D-Wave is doing is finding a solution that’s better than classical computers. And some researchers say there isn’t definitive theoretical proof as to how much better annealing is compared to classical computing. That’s one of the reasons why it can be hard to gauge the actual impact D-Wave System is having on real-world problems like the optimisation puzzle at the port.

The quantum system was only introduced at one part at the port, an area called Pier 300. The truckers work across 12 different piers. You’d think the truckers would be impressed by the newfound efficiency at Pier 300, but that’s not what we found when we spoke to them.

Have you noticed any difference in those 23 years you’ve been here? Has it got more automated? Has it got more efficient? Or . . .

Unidentified speaker
Well . . . No, everything is the same.

Unidentified speaker
There are certain terminals and it takes a little longer. There’s other terminals, for example, much quicker.

John Thornhill
Which ones are they? Which of the terminals?

Unidentified speaker
I would say at Pier E, Long Beach.

John Thornhill
In fact, it wasn’t Pier 300, but a completely different pier named Pier E, which doesn’t use quantum at all that was the favourite of many truckers.

Unidentified speaker
For me, Pier E!

John Thornhill
All right. Yeah, everyone says that.

Unidentified speaker
Oh, Pier E, Pier E. It’s faster. Pier E, Pier E. They got that all these machines. It takes like 5 minutes to 10 minutes. And you would be going out.

John Thornhill
At pier 300, do you know anything about that one? Or . . .

Unidentified speaker
300, right there. It’s oh, sometimes the, the, how you call it, the lines, usually big.

John Thornhill
When we asked Matt Schrap, head of the Harbor Trucking Association, about Ed’s claim that they were seeing big reductions in waiting times, he wasn’t so sure either.

Does that seem credible to you?

Matt Schrap
I’ll believe it when I see it. (Laughter)

John Thornhill
Matt shared his data about waiting times at Pier 300. And according to those numbers, there hasn’t been any change at all since quantum was introduced. This is all quite far removed from what SavantX claims of massive reductions in wait times. SavantX, we should mention, says that Harbor Trucking’s data isn’t representative, but it’s also worth remembering that the quantum system at Pier 300 wasn’t designed for the people working this port. It was built first and foremost to save money for the operators of Pier 300. Sometimes that doesn’t work out quite so well for the truck drivers.

So Madhu, we were visiting the Port of Los Angeles, where we were seeing how a quantum computer could affect the operations of the port. But you, as AI editor at the Financial Times, have seen how of automation processes work in lots of different industries and sectors. What do you make of all this?

Madhumita Murgia
So it’s hard to imagine with quantum computers what the efficiencies could look like because they don’t, as we said, they don’t really exist at scale. But a good maybe example anchored in reality today is when you introduce algorithms, for example, you know, run by artificial intelligence, because you do see some parallels with this complaint about really efficiency not improving as much as expected. It’s not always because the technology doesn’t work or isn’t good enough. It’s often because of the human factors that come into play. When you put automation into a chaotic, complex system which involves lots of moving parts, but also lots of human beings who, you know, who behave differently around new technologies, who might resist them, who, you know, have habits in place that mean that you don’t see the efficiencies that engineers would expect in the laboratory. And the other problem, of course, is how it changes jobs and maybe even, you know, make some jobs redundant. The third thing is it is really hard to measure exactly what’s being improved across the whole system. And you know, how to quantify that. Is that what you found with the LA port as well?

John Thornhill
I think you’re quite right. I mean, one of the things that really struck us, I think, was just how complex this port system is. And people tend to focus on the kind of narrow technological aspect of all this, but it’s part of a far bigger human ecosystem. They’re all the shippers and the truckers and the containers operators and the lift operators. It’s an incredibly complex operation and so you can optimise one small part of it, but that doesn’t mean to say you’re gonna improve the overall efficiency of the entire port. SavantX say that they’re definitely reducing the number of cranes needed at the port, which should result in savings. But, you know, this is a major issue for the dock workers there and they wouldn’t speak to us because of an ongoing contract negotiation. But I think this is a kind of broader point about quantum can introduce new applications that can do things differently in very specific areas, which can have then bigger general effects.

Madhumita Murgia
And, you know, you’ve discussed this as well earlier on, where we know that D-Wave is perhaps limited in what it can do in its sort of quantum efficiencies. But it does give us an idea of what it might look like when machines or systems based on quantum mechanics are introduced into the real world and really the direction that we’re moving in.

John Thornhill
Yeah, a lot of people, I think, have told us that you can only use quantum computers when they get to a million qubits. But I think D-Wave is a good example of what quantum efficiency gains you can get earlier than that. And a lot of improvements are just marginal gains, doing something slightly better than you’ve done it before. It’s a kind of evolutionary, not revolutionary process. And so I think you can help improve a very complex ecosystem. I mean, Ed from SavantX says it’s not a blockbuster application, but that’s part of the point.

Ed Heinbockel
We didn’t turn quantum on and all of a sudden the port was twice as efficient. But you start picking up, you know, 5, 10 per cent, here and there, it adds up, right? And you can start thinking about these problems in ways that we’ve never had that lecture before. And that’s what quantum allows you to do. That’s what the future is going to hold for sure.

John Thornhill
Next time on Tech Tonic: Is there more to the quantum revolution than quantum computers?

Margot Taylor
Are we, we were . . . we thought it was a miracle? (Laughter) We hadn’t seen really good recordings of ongoing brain function in little children before. So for me, this is just a tremendous breakthrough.

John Thornhill
We go beyond the computers to find out about the impact other types of quantum technology, things like quantum sensors, are already having on the world.

Matthew Brookes
A lot of people, when they think about quantum technology, they immediately think of quantum computing, which is interesting, is exciting, but it’s not the only game in town.

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John Thornhill
This has been Tech Tonic from the Financial Times. I’m John Thornhill.

Madhumita Murgia
And I’m Madhumita Murgia. Tech Tonic’s senior producer is Edwin Lane, and our producer is Josh Gabert-Doyon. Manuela Saragosa is our executive producer. Sound design by Breen Turner and Samantha Giovinco. Cheryl Brumley is our global head of audio. Special thanks to the National Quantum Computing Centre for their help on this episode.

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