Keynote Speaker

Abstract

Autonomous vehicles navigating busy streets, an algorithmic trader seeking to maximize returns - all represent autonomous agents. Each executes complex strategies - continually adapting their actions based on past experiences. As society pushes such agentic intelligence to perform ever more complex tasks, the computational resource requirements of such agents is growing in tandem – contributing to chip shortages, and a growing energy footprint of such technologies. Indeed with the rapid advances in large language models, the memory resources costs and energetic costs required are growing in tandem at unsustainable rates. Is this merely a result of engineering inefficiency or is there a fundamental energetic cost to executing complex strategies? 

Here we demonstrate that there is a fundamental energetic cost in executing a target strategy - one that all classical agents must obey. We illustrate that cost is unavoidable, born from the need for an agent to be prepared for any possible future contingency.  We show how quantum computing can surpass such bounds. The end result being a quantum agent that is equally prepared for future contingencies, while using fundamentally less memory and energy. Thus the most efficient way to make decisions in the face of future uncertainty is quantum mechanical.

Biography

Jayne Thompson is an Associate Professor at NTU college of computing and data science with expertise in quantum information and quantum computing. She previously held roles in industry and the public sector as the Group Manager for Quantum Algorithms and Physics at A*Star's Institute of High Performance Computing, Principal Scientist and Technical Product Manager at Horizon Quantum Computing -- a quantum compiler company building full stack quantum software. As well as in academia as a Research Fellow at the Centre for Quantum Technologies (CQT), Singapore. Jayne received her PhD in theoretical physics from the University of Melbourne in 2012. She is currently a Fellow of both the Foundational Questions Institute (FQXi) and the Centre for Quantum Technologies. Her work spans quantum protocols, and design of quantum algorithms and programming languages.