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

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: 3, Funny) by cocaine overdose on Tuesday March 06 2018, @12:33PM

    Knowing Alibaba and the Chinese, their Qubit system is probably 11 transistor amplifiers wired in parallel with total I/O speeds of 11 "Qubits" per second. Or maybe they've glued an "intern" to a very powerful toy model train and driven him through many small rooms filled with "Department of Wellness and Safety Certified Safe for Human Encounter" materials, while being hooked up to a remote microphone and a heartbeat sensor. If the heartbeat sensor says he's alive, that's a 0. If it says he's dead, that's a 1. If the microphone detects screaming and the heartbeat sensor says he's dead, that's a superposition of both dead and alive. We only need 11 of these novel and revolutionary devices to power our advanced Qubit engine.

    Industry disruption aside, Alibaba Cloud keeps charging me $10 to check for "ability to pay" everytime my monthly usage goes up a few cents -- and hasn't refunded any of the Hamilton's they've China'd away from my PayPal.

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