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[...] The latest round brings the total amount of venture funding raised by Rigetti to $69.2 million.
"Quantum computing will enable people to tackle a whole new set of problems that were previously unsolvable," said Chad Rigetti, founder and chief executive officer of Rigetti Computing. "This is the next generation of advanced computing technology. The potential to make a positive impact on humanity is enormous."
"We will use the funding to expand our business and engineering teams and continue to invest in infrastructure to manufacture and deploy our quantum integrated circuits," Rigetti added.
Source: http://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/03/quantum-computer-startup-rigetti.html
Previously mentioned here: https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=16/02/10/181240
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday April 03 2017, @08:41PM (3 children)
I hate to sound like a cynical old man (though I am definitely cynical, and was accused of this when very young), but why is this *so* important? We already have strong-enough crypto, and we have far more pressing problems in the computing space, such as:
1) computing platforms being closed, corporate-controlled silos (Windows monopoly on the desktop, iOS/Android on mobile)
2) web development is a complete disaster, with web pages requiring loading megabytes of data just to read some text; needing to program in multiple different languages (PHP/Java on the server, JS (+ a zillion "frameworks") on the client, HTML which was designed for crummy static layout, CSS which is a giant turd)
3) software quality is a complete nightmare
How about we stop and make software development into an actual *engineering* discipline instead of a giant hackfest before working on the Next Big Thing?
We are not lacking in computing hardware capability at this point; we're limited solely by our shitty software. Making a whole new class of hardware isn't going to improve this; in fact it'll just make it worse.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03 2017, @09:00PM
Despite being old and/or allegedly cynical, you clearly have no clue how the world works. Any sentence that begins "why can't we all..." is doomed. Progress is made not by winning a logical argument with a flourish and a slap in the face with a white glove, but only by old guys dying off one by one. No-one is *ever* going to sit down and sort out the old stuff. Shit will move on, and on, and on. And one day people will say, wow pointers?!? What were they thinking!
Cynical now?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 04 2017, @09:49AM
Wrong.
There are classes of hard problem for which we currently do physical modeling. Being able to model this with traditional computers is not possible efficiently. A commonly cited example in this category is protein folding. Imagine if all those folding@home cycles, all that electricity which took human sweat and direction and life, not to mention the environmental impact, could have been saved?
If you understand big-O notation, you should also understand that categorically improving efficiency, when the problems are very close to computationally intractable, is a Big Deal.
(Score: 2) by kaszz on Tuesday April 04 2017, @03:28PM
As long as we have turd humans + technology and a lack of natural selection of those projects that are fit for reality. Giant turd software will just multiply.
One hope is right now that CPUs have reached a frequency limit at circa 4 GHz and perhaps a TDP at ~150 W. Meaning that those that can make the most of that will have one up over the competition.