Google published a series of results obtained with the D-Wave 2X quantum computer, a system purchased to use it together with NASA. The fuss came from the fact that tests showed performance a hundred million times greater than those of a traditional processor. The problem is that these results are achieved only for specific operations ending up adding new controversy around these systems.
Google has released a new search mobile application, already known as Google Search, in the version for Android and iOS. Now it offers the ability to answer complex questions, claiming to have made a significant step forward compared to previous capacity to interpre users’ requests. Now the app really understands the meaning of what the user is asking (for now only in English).
Google released its TensorFlow machine learning engine as a free / open source library. It’s the core of a software used by the company for services such as Google Now and Google Photo. It was originally developed by the Google Brain team, the deep learning project started in 2011 to address issues about artificial intelligence and neural networks.
Google introduced a new compression algorithm called Brotli in order to reduce the traffic of web pages. The idea is that web sites transmit everything that composes the various pages in this compressed format allowing in this way also a higher loading speed. Google released Brotli as free / open source software under the Apache 2.0 license and put the source code available to anyone on GitHub.
Google announced a major corporate restructuring based on the creation of a holding company called Alphabet that will contain the companies now owned by Google. Google’s co-founder Larry Page will be the CEO of Alphabet and the other co-founder Sergey Brin will be its President. Google’s name will continue to exist as one of the new holding’s companies with Sundar Pichai, who’s been working there since 2004 and has been involved in the Android and Chrome projects, as its CEO.
