This week we start out by investigating a plane that can fly for 90 days without needing to land or refuel. We also examine the path to autonomy for the agricultural sector. There is a lot of innovation in that space and farming will look very different a few years from now. We then discover a new phase of matter. We know about 4 phases, gas, liquid, solid and plasma. Now we have discovered Time Crystals. Finally we look at a recent court case in Australia where in a world first, a judge found that an Artificial Intelligence could be named as an Inventor on a Patent.
A Plane that can fly for 90 days at a time
The US Navy is developing an uncrewed aircraft, Skydweller, that will be able keep flying for 90 days without need to land. The project is being developed by a US-Spanish company, Skydweller Aero.
The aircraft has a 72 meter wingspan which houses 270 square meters of solar cells which will generate up to 2 kilowatts of power. A backup hydrogen fuel cell system will allow the aircraft to go through prolonged spells of bad weather.
The aircraft can carry 360kg of radar and camera equipment. The ability to have one takeoff and one landing and no pilot on board for a 90 day flight means huge cost savings. As with many military driven advances, the technology will no doubt find its’ way to civilian aircraft over time.
AI as an Inventor
An Australian Federal Court has recognized an AI as the Inventor of a patent. This is a world first. The court ruled in favor of Dr Stephen Thaler from the US based Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS).
Whilst the court named the AI as the Inventor of the patent the court also ruled that the AI could not be an applicant for a patent nor a grantee of a patent. Those roles are still reserved for humans.
The Artificial Inventor Project, run out of the University of Surrey has filed patent applications in 17 countries. All countries Patent Offices rejected the AI as the inventor (other than South Africa which granted the application through an administrative decision rather than judicial one). The Australian Patent Act does not define the term ‘inventor’. The judge had to consider if the term had changed from its human conception. In a world first the Judge decided, that our creations can also create.
The Path to Autonomy for Agriculture
We have spoken in the past about a range of autonomous developments in the Agricultural space. Raven Applied Technology, a South Dakota based agricultural technology company (it is a part of the wider Raven Industries Group), has developed a road map (featuring many of their products) that will show the path ahead.
Have a look here, here, here and here for our previous stories. We can combine those developments with a range of AI driven products that we have looked at things such as rain prediction here, products to improve yield here, and the use of Satellites to monitor crop development (we spoke about Flurosat which is now called Regrow after a merger with a competitor). Many of the developments that we have discussed are in the phases from 2 to 4. Stage 5 is coming.
Last week John Deere bought Bear Flag Robotics to continue the build out of their autonomous agriculture line. The industry is changing rapidly and consolidation is underway. The autonomous farm of the future is not long away. We will most likely start to see autonomous products sold as Farming as a Service via subscriptions. Equipment will be remotely monitored and serviced in a similar way to how MRI machines and other high end technical equipment are managed today. Farmers will be technology managers rather than laborers and machine operators.
A new phase of Matter
Up to now we have known about 4 phases of matter: Solid, Liquid, Gas and Plasma. In the solid phase the molecules in an object are bound together and the volume of the object is determined by the shape of the object. The liquid phase involves weaker bonds between molecules however the liquid still has a fixed volume. In the gas phase the bonds are very weak and the gas will take the shape of its’ container. In the plasma phase, which occurs at ultra high temperatures, matter becomes a mixture of neutral atoms, negatively charged free electrons and positively charged ions. This phase responds to and generates electromagnetic forces (this is what happens in the sun, the enormous size and thus gravity of the sun determines its shape). At each phase the atoms are locked into the lowest energy state permitted by the ambient temperature.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that entropy (the amount of disorder in a closed system) always increases. This is one of the fundamental laws of nature as we currently understand them. On 29 July 2021 a long list of researchers from Corneal University (and other institutions), published a paper that announced the discovery of Time Crystals, a new phase of matter (the paper is here).
We are not talking about the time crystals that were used in Dr Who (that was fiction, sorry if that is a shock to some, take a deep breath and read on). These Time Crystals are a phase of matter that moves in a regular, repeating cycle continuously without using any energy. This phase of matter has sidestepped the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Time Crystals were first envisioned in 2012 by Professor Frank Wilczek. He considered how crystals might behave over time, with some of them undergoing periodic motion then returning to their original configuration. Despite moving they would require no input of energy and the motion would continue indefinitely. Over the next 5 years a range of scientists tried to develop a time crystal.
In 2016 a few groups of researchers discovered that if they tickled a localized chain of particles in a certain way with a laser, the particles spin would flip back and forth between two states continuously and without absorbing any energy from the laser.
This was the initial discovery of time crystals (they did not know it at the time). In 2021 this group published a report that they had developed “prethermal” time crystals which would not run forever but would come into equilibrium.
Stepping back to 2019, Google’s Sycamore quantum computer was first used to solve a problem in 200 minutes that would take a conventional computer 10,000 years to solve. Sycamore unfortunately was to error prone to consistently solve cryptographic or algorithmic problems.
After the publication of the ‘prethermal” time crystals paper in 2021, Google was approached by Veda Khemani and her team to see if they were able to use Sycamore to study this new crystal. That is when Sycamore was put to work.
A quantum computer is comprised of qubits, quantum particles that can be in two possible states simultaneously. Sycamore uses superconducting aluminum strips which were programed to simulate a particles spin - either up or down.
By tuning the strength of the integrations between the qubits, destructive interference was introduced and the 20 qubits locked into a set orientation. The researchers then tickled the system with microwaves, which caused the system to flip back and forth between the two spin states. The spins neither absorbed nor dissipated energy from the microwaves, which left the entropy of the system unchanged thus violating the second law. Coincidentally a team at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands also reported in early July 2021, that they had built a Time Crystal in 7 carbons atoms in a diamond.
There may be uses for Time Crystals in quantum computing. Data is stored in qubits which exist in multiple states at the same time. Data stored in a quantum computer can therefore vary depending upon when it is read. If we generate time crystals in quantum bits the data would be consistently read each time it is viewed. This would increase the accuracy of data stored in a quantum system.
This discovery may also help us to understand why time only appears to move forward. Einstein helped us to unify space and time. There may be many more out-of-equilibrium states of matter such as the Time Crystals, that behave differently over time. We may be able to discover why.
For those that want to read more, start here.
Paying it Forward
If you have a start-up or know of a start-up that has a product ready for market please let me know. I would be happy to have a look and feature the startup in this newsletter. Also if any startups need introductions please get in touch and I will help where I can.
If you have any questions or comments please email me via my website craigcarlyon.com or comment below.
I would also appreciate it if you could forward this newsletter to anyone that you think might be interested.
Till next week.