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Alibaba Fires Up a Cloudy Quantum Computer

posted by mrpg on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:00AM   Printer-friendly
from the good-and-bad dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Alibaba reckons the world needs another quantum computer in the cloud, so it's opened up access to an 11-qubit system.

The system landed almost exactly a year after IBM announced its five-qubit quantum offering. In November last year, Big Blue embiggened the system to 20 qubits.

So as well as being the second cloudy quantum computer on the market, Alibaba's offering is also the second-fastest, as the company correctly claimed in its announcement.

The Alibaba offering is a collaboration with the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and is cooled to as low as 10 milli-Kelvin[sic] (-273 °C).

Alibaba's announcement did not, however, detail the tools or APIs customers will use to interact with the system.

[Update: "milli-Kelvin" is all kinds of wrong, but appeared in the original source and is quoted here verbatim -- hence the now-added "[sic]". For more information on the origins and use of the term, see the entry on Wikipedia. --martyb]

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  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:36AM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <{pc-soylent} {at} {asdf.fi}> on Tuesday March 06 2018, @08:36AM (#648423) Homepage
    I just put a 69-bit quantum computer online. That runs at room temperature. No, I'm not going to tell you the IP address. It currently runs the program "pretend to be a deity for over a billion people".

    What was it that Popper said about the non-falsifiable?
    --
    Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
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  • (Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday March 06 2018, @05:11PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Tuesday March 06 2018, @05:11PM (#648565) Journal

    I just put a 69-bit quantum computer online.

    Might it be that the "69" does not describe the number of qubits, but the position they are in, and you just implemented rule 34 for quantum computing? :-)

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.