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posted by martyb on Wednesday March 07 2018, @12:08PM   Printer-friendly
from the all-your-cryto-are-belong-to-us dept.

Google Takes Aim at Quantum Supremacy with 72-Qubit Chip

Google's Quantum AI Lab has revealed it is testing a 72-qubit quantum processor in its bid to become the first company to demonstrate quantum supremacy.

The chip, known as Bristlecone, was revealed on Monday at the annual American Physical Society meeting in Los Angeles. Given that you only need 49 or 50 qubits to demonstrate quantum supremacy – the capability of a quantum computer to outperform the largest supercomputers on certain computational tasks – a 72-qubit processor should be more than enough to achieve such a milestone. However, the error rates of such a system must be low enough so that it to be of practical use. Moreover, the ability to test a system for quantum supremacy is confounded by the very fact that classical computers cannot be used to compare test results.

Julian Kelly, a research scientist at the Quantum AI Lab who presented Bristlecone at this week's American Physical Society meeting, described the progress of their work in a Google Research blog post. In his writeup, he characterized the new chip as a "a testbed for research into system error rates and scalability of our qubit technology, as well as applications in quantum simulation, optimization, and machine learning."

Also at BGR.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @01:01PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 07 2018, @01:01PM (#648970)

    How does one program such a thing to do something useful?

    One simply doesn't. Many, possibly entangled many, an orgy of them so to speak, may.