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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday January 03 2019, @09:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the might-or-might-not-be-true dept.

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ionq-trapped-ion-quantum-computer-google,38255.html

IonQ, one of many companies developing a quantum computer, has announced a new trapped ion quantum computer with 79 processing qubits. The company claims this quantum computer should beat Google's 72-qubit quantum computer, not just in terms of number of qubits, but also in total processing performance.

The IonQ trapped ion quantum computer was able to break a world record for a particular problem using the Bernstein-Vazirani Algorithm. This algorithm tests the ability of a computer to determine an encoded number, called an oracle, when allowed only a single yes/no question.

For a 10-bit oracle (a number between 0 and 1,023) a conventional computer succeeds 0.2 percent of the time. However, the IonQ quantum computer achieved a success rate of 73 percent. This is a better result than any other quantum computer has achieved so far.

IonQ's 79-qubit quantum computer has shown one and two-gate fidelity rates of 99.97 percent and 99.3 percent, respectively, which is significantly higher than the fidelity rates of competitors. The closest seems to be Google's 72-qubit quantum computer with a single-qubit gate fidelity of 99.9 percent and two-qubit gate fidelity rate of 99.4 percent.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:09PM (1 child)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Thursday January 03 2019, @02:09PM (#781466) Homepage
    The output of the classical test is indeed a single bit, and therefore you can glean very little information from it. However, the output of the quantum test (for a 10-bit challenge) is 11 bits, not 1, as it contains all 10 bits of the input in it too, quantumly smooshed together (as you can't destroy information). Therefore I don't think it's as meaningful as it first seems to meaningful to compare the two. If you could get 11 bits out of a classical algorithm - and chose what those bits represented, namely one correctness bit per input bit - then you'd solve it in one query too. Deterministically, 100% guaranteed. And by that measure, a comparable classical algorithm would dominate the quantum one.

    Of course, you could say that the reason that the quantum algorithm works is because the cheating is part of the quantum game, and that would be fair. This algorithm was specifically designed to exploit a quantum property to do something that is impossible clasically. But how come the quantum team is permitted to design a circuit that, given a secret 10 bit number, outputs 11 bits, but the classical team are not permitted to design a circuit that, given a secret 10 bit number, outputs 10 bits (don't need the extra one that the quantum one needs obviously)?

    Not a fair comparison. (Which is why there's the exponential 'advantage', ones where quantum plays fair tend to have a polynomial (sqrt) advantage, not an exponential one.)
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  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Friday January 04 2019, @09:55AM

    by driverless (4770) on Friday January 04 2019, @09:55AM (#781979)

    For a 10-bit oracle (a number between 0 and 1,023) a conventional computer succeeds 0.2 percent of the time. However, the IonQ quantum computer achieved a success rate of 73 percent.

    And a seven-year-old child who can count to a thousand has a success rate of 100 percent. It's not "a bit of a cheat", it's a total cheat.