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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Just when it was looking like the underdog, classical computing is striking back. IBM has come up with a way to simulate quantum computers that have 56 quantum bits, or qubits, on a non-quantum supercomputer – a task previously thought to be impossible. The feat moves the goalposts in the fight for quantum supremacy, the effort to outstrip classical computers using quantum ones.
It used to be widely accepted that a classical computer cannot simulate more than 49 qubits because of memory limitations. The memory required for simulations increases exponentially with each additional qubit.
The closest anyone had come to putting the 49-qubit limit to a test was a 45-qubit simulation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, which needed 500 terabytes of memory. IBM's new simulation upends the assumption by simulating 56 qubits with only 4.5 terabytes.
The simulation is based on a mathematical trick that allows a more compact numerical representation of different arrangements of qubits, known as quantum states.
A quantum computing operation is typically represented by a table of numbers indicating what should be done to each qubit to produce a new quantum state. Instead, researchers at IBM's T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York, used tensors – effectively multidimensional tables augmented with axes beyond rows and columns.
[...] they've upped the ante in the race to outperform classical computers with quantum systems. Google previously said they were on track to build a working 49-qubit processor by the end of 2017, but that will no longer win them the achievement of quantum supremacy.
[...] IBM's goal is to build a quantum computer that can "explore practical problems" such as quantum chemistry, says Wisnieff. He hopes to check the accuracy of quantum computers against his simulations before putting real quantum computers to the test.
"I want to be able to write algorithms that I know the answers for before I run them on a real quantum computer," he says.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by anubi on Tuesday October 24 2017, @05:43AM
This topic reminds me of a little thing in our history where Ptolemy tried to describe the Universe. Earth centered. Boy, did he have a complex model.
Then Copernicus came around and saw things from another angle. Maybe we aren't at the center of the Universe. Things got much much simpler.
It won't be the first time that things that appear to be impossibly complex turn out to be quite elegant when "seen at the right angle".
It would be quite foolhardy of us to think we have seen it all by now.
We are just getting started.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]