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posted by martyb on Wednesday November 15 2017, @04:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the slowly-getting-a-little-bit-bigger dept.

IBM Raises the Bar with a 50-Qubit Quantum Computer

IBM established a landmark in computing Friday, announcing a quantum computer that handles 50 quantum bits, or qubits. The company is also making a 20-qubit system available through its cloud computing platform.

IBM, Google, Intel, and a San Francisco startup called Rigetti are all currently racing to build useful quantum systems. These machines process information in a different way from traditional computers, using the counterintuitive nature of quantum physics.

The announcement does not mean quantum computing is ready for common use. The system IBM has developed is still extremely finicky and challenging to use, as are those being built by others. In both the 50- and the 20-qubit systems, the quantum state is preserved for 90 microseconds—a record for the industry, but still an extremely short period of time.

[...] IBM is also announcing an upgrade to its quantum cloud software system today. "We're at world record pace. But we've got to make sure non-physicists can use this," Gil says.

The announcement should perhaps be treated cautiously, though. Andrew Childs, a professor at the University of Maryland, points out that IBM has not published details of its system in a peer-reviewed journal. "IBM's team is fantastic and it's clear they're serious about this, but without looking at the details it's hard to comment," he says. Childs says the larger number of qubits does not necessarily translate to a leap in computational capability. "Those qubits might be noisy, and there could be issues with how well connected they are," he says.

Also at The Mercury News and SiliconANGLE.

Previously: IBM Promises Commercialization of 50 Qubit Quantum Computers
IBM and D-Wave Quantum Computing Announcements
Intel Ships 17-Qubit Quantum Chip to Researchers
Google's Quantum Computing Plans Threatened by IBM Curveball (doesn't this undermine IBM's quantum system as well?)

Related: Microsoft is Developing a Quantum Computing Programming Language


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  • (Score: 2) by vux984 on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:59PM (1 child)

    by vux984 (5045) on Wednesday November 15 2017, @05:59PM (#597388)

    I see where you are going, but there is a clear relationship between unary and binary; at the same feature size binary numbers require log2 n digits as the unary system. And that expresses its space efficiency quite well.

    q-bits, as I understand it can exist as a superposition of 0 and 1. So, theoretically, (and again limited by understanding of what is really going on); if you had 8 q-bits than you theoretically are representing, all the numbers from 0 to 28-1 at once. So if you had a problem that classically iterated through each of the 256 possibilies to see if it was a solution, then with q-bits that calculation instead of taking n time would take constant time, you'd operate once on the super-position-state and get the output solution; as the quantum computer instead of iterating would effectively operate on all the possibilities at once.

    Sort of like how a GPU with its thousands of cores can do the same operation on thousands of inputs all at once; except you don't need a physical core for parallel operation. Continuing that analogy, then a 256 core GPU and an 8 bit qbit quantum computer can sort of do the same amount of work in one 'pass'. But you will rapidly run into limits on cores... a 50 qbit computer ... can do what a classical computer would need a quadrillion cores to do. (Again... not exactly, but that's sort of the idea of the relative scale. And just because it has 50 qbits does not make it equivalent to a quadrillion core GPU, modern GPUs are 'clocked' much much faster than quantum computers; and a qbit is just a single bit. (each gpu core works on 16, 32, or 64 bits at a time. So 50 qbits isn't THAT impressive... but if it continues to grow and we get up to kilo-qbits, mega-qbits and beyond...then it could potentially do some types of calculations faster than all the classical computers ever built could do. Again I'd like to throw in the disclaimer that i don't know what im talking about very well.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday November 15 2017, @10:02PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday November 15 2017, @10:02PM (#597485)

    As to the OP question: I'd think of this 50 qbit computer in the realm of the Intel 4004 chips, as far as the quantum computing is concerned - very early stage, very few and extremely specific applications.

    It's surrounded by a highly sophisticated modern binary system, but at its core, it's got 50 qbits, like 50 flip-flops, but quantum - and comparing a flip-flop to a qbit is sort of like comparing apples and honey bees.

    By the way, for any who are interested, IBM has a 20 qbit device hooked up to a web interface which is occasionally available for the general public to experiment with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Quantum_Experience [wikipedia.org]

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